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Slowing Down

This post is of a pair with 540. And due to Hokey Smokes, there’s even a little more spice. I finally get a link and then I’m going to put on the brakes!

Since today is my birthday, I try and reflect on things I can readily change up to stay out of unhealthy ruts or just to keep myself fresh. 540 days in a row is more than enough to prove that I can keep a posting streak alive. The conjunction of birthday, nice round number, and national holiday seems more than auspicious timing to give up that streak. Plus, I’ve been at this blogging thing off and on for well over 10 years. (Remember when it was all about “social software”?)

Even though I disagree a bit with the whole post, Greg Linden recently captured a bit of where I’m at:

I find my blogging here to be too useful to me to stop doing it. I have also embraced microblogging in its many forms. Yet I am left wondering if there is something we are all missing, something shorter than blogging and longer than tweets and different than both, that would encourage thoughtful, useful, relevant mass communication.

We are still far from ideal. A few years ago, it used to be that millions of blog and press articles flew past, some of which might pile up in an RSS reader, a few of which might get read. Now, millions of tweets, thousands of Facebook posts, and millions of articles fly past, some of which might be seen in an app, a few of which might get read. Attention is random; being seen is luck of the draw. We are far from ideal.

I don’t think blogging is dead. I’m not sure blogging was always about journalism. And I personally haven’t embraced microblogging, although Twitter makes for a great link stream. But blogging is too useful, and fun!, for me to stop cold. I will however, be slowing down a bit. Might be a couple of posts a week but probably no less than once per. I will, however, feel no obligation to any given frequency. So if you’ve been using this blog as your daily hit of excitement, I thank you for your attention, but encourage you to add another source or two as a replacement.

And even though the posting streak wasn’t particularly onerous in terms of time, I’ll be trying to turn the same habits of mind to side projects involving coding and data analysis. This also means my content should trend to more technical topics but we’ll see. With this year’s #3 pick in the NBA draft, the Washington Wizards luck is looking up, so they might be even more interesting to talk about in 2013-14. I also have this half-assed idea to do a series of 10 REM posts, reminiscing on 10 years of blogging, by trawling through the archives of Mass Programming Resistance, New Media Hack, and out into the wider web.

Be seeing you!

P.S. Feels like Greg has another start-up thread within him even though there’s already a clear direction for Geeky Ventures!

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