The Matter of Commitment, Desire & Twitter
I’m sure you’ve noticed the lack of blog posts recently here at WriteTilt.com. I haven’t posted because I’ve been too busy to do so. My lack of posts is quite simple: lack of commitment and desire.
I have fallen victim to these issues before in the past. For three straight years, I blogged very consistently, pretty much on a weekly basis. Back then, blogging was new to me, and I loved the idea of free-form communication on the web without restraints. There was a time when I thought I’d never stop blogging but I did. I didn’t feel as committed to blogging every week and that I was forcing myself to write about something just to post and appease my readers. However, forcing words just for my audience felt false because I just wasn’t feeling it the way I once did. The shiny luster of blogging had worn off, and I also felt burned out. So I took a hiatus and eventually decided to shut my first blog down about two months later.
For approximately one year, I didn’t blog before I got the itch to return. I resurfaced under this domain and took a different approach to blogging from my previous one. I wrote whenever I felt like I wanted to write and tried not to fall under pressure to post every day or even every week. I succeeded and actually thought I could survive the blogosphere, possibly for good. Then Twitter happened.
I love Twitter - when it isn’t failing of course - and used the micro-blogging tool as an “ad hoc service” to blogging here at WriteTilt.com. When I first started using Twitter, I dismissed the tool as a blogging replacement. And of course, you can’t say as much with 140 characters as you can with a blog. However, an odd thing happened to me. As I used Twitter more, my desire and commitment to blogging slowly diminished. I found that I liked the idea of expressing myself in small spurts throughout the day rather than sitting down and thinking about a topic to expand upon in a blog post. Still, I didn’t think that long-form blogging was dead…until I heard a recent Net@Night episode.
I had a sudden realization as Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur discussed the death of blogs that blogging might be over for me. I started thinking and realized that blogs were not that important to me anymore. I had stopped reading a number of blogs and reduced my subscription to approximately 10 RSS feeds. I wasn’t posting as frequently here because I felt that Twitter was almost enough for me 99% of the time. I also didn’t feel the need to dig into topics with depth on WriteTilt.com because my focus has increasingly turned towards other personal ventures/projects. And finally, I fell victim to the culture of redundancy in the blogosphere. Why do I need to spend so much time thinking and writing about things that thousands of other bloggers are discussing at the same time? Yes, I know that my voice as a writer is what makes me different, but at the same time, that’s a lot of noise for a reader to filter through when searching on a topic. I still have things to say, but if I can say it in a 140 characters or less or via Pownce, then I’m perfectly fine with that. I can devote my energy to more important personal projects rather than spending so much time composing posts and doing research that thousands of others are doing.
That being said, I’ve been pondering what to do with WriteTilt.com. I have thought about converting the site to a Tumblr blog or using it as a launch page for all of my social networks. However, at the same time, I go back and forth about taking down what I’ve written and maintaining a blog for when I do have things to say that requires more than 140 characters. I haven’t come to a decision as of yet. There was a time when I thought WriteTilt.com would become a brand, and on a much smaller scale, it is. However, I’m not trying to be Michael Arrington with TechCrunch or a number of other heavily trafficked blogs. Quite frankly, I’m not trying to kill myself blogging around the clock in a bid to keep up with the big boys, which is a sure-fire way to burn out.
I know some people would say I could continue to blog on my own terms, whenever I want. The problem is that I see myself blogging even less as I get more involved in my other projects. I have also asked myself one simple question: if I left blogging for good, would it matter to me? The answer to the question is no, it wouldn’t matter. So, will I continue to blog? I don’t know the answer to that question just yet. It’s one I’m still pondering every day.