I have had some form of this blog since 2003 – this is actually its third iteration. First I hand-coded a bloggy sort of website on Tripod using the certified HTML 101 skills I learned in a Barnes & Noble online course (and from stealing the code from a friend’s blog that I admired). That got old real quick. In 2004 I launched Things I’ve Seen* as a $4.95 a month Typepad blog and I stayed there until last winter, when I decided I needed my own domain and the pain of a WordPress blog (truly – that is another post). The blog as you read it now is hosted by my very generous friend and co-worker, Josh, who also has helped me through much that’s inscrutable about WordPress.
I also have written and mostly abandoned or deleted several Blogger blogs, the best of which remains collecting dust at coit avenue. I stopped writing there after the last Michigan gubernatorial election, when our blogging efforts earned the Michigan Liberal blogging contingent an invitation to tea at the Guv’s mansion (I think it’s OK to tell about it now. The Governor was cool and she didn’t try to coerce us into writing anything in particular, I promise.) Part of my leaving that one behind also had to do with my taking a job at a private university – ’nuff said.
Although my reading tells me now that blogs have been around since about 1998 or so, I know I was among the first wave of bloggers who began writing about the time that funny word ‘weblog’ or ‘blog’ started to make its way into our vocabulary – which coincided with the arrival of easy-to-use blogging platforms, such as Blogger and Typepad. In other words, I’d blogged for a long time … right up until the advent of Facebook-for-Everyone and, of course my favorite social phenomenon, Twitter.
And that’s when my blogging tapered off to near nothingness.
I have brought this up before, I think. And I’ve pointed to the usual reasons – I spend too much time reading and playing on Facebook; I say everything I want to say in 140 character bursts all day (not!) and have nothing left for blogging; and my favorite – my new job exhausts me with long days and besides offers me little blogging fodder after you set aside all the confidential information I deal with daily as a communications director.
The real truth is harder to face, but here it is: I feel I have nothing to say. Seriously! I follow people on Twitter and Facebook who are experts in their fields – hell, my field! No thought in my head is new, different or interesting – nothing is something any one of them has not already thought about, turned over and inside out, re-examined or proclaimed the final word on. And I don’t just read what they have to say – I chat with or otherwise interact with them, hear them at conferences and webinars, go to meetups and tweetups and, well, I just feel I have nothing to add to the conversations.
True. Where once was an almost daily blogger is now someone struck dumb. And I don’t like it one bit.
And so, determined to get my writing mojo back, I googled ‘need a blog topic’ tonight and, besides finding – once again – Chris Brogan’s wonderful 100 topics, I landed on Monica O’Brien’s site (don’t I follow her on Twitter? I used to), where she says I don’t need one particular blogging topic. Which, yeah, I know, and that wasn’t particularly the advice I was looking for. Still I did come across this bit:
“Write about what you are learning.”
Because, of course, we are always learning. And if I’m just learning about something, well, readers will forgive me if I don’t seem like an expert, right? Sounds good to me. As a writer, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before! It’s perfect.
So here goes – my newest blogging effort. Musings about what I am learning. You’re welcome to read along.
*Yes, I know the blog is still there at TypePad. But it won’t be as soon as I get all the photos moved over here.
