Has anyone ever experienced “Bloggers Block?” You know, where you have plenty of things to write about, but are unable to select a topic and put some metaphorical pen to paper? I’ve been experiencing this since my return from extended holiday.
I arrived back and started work again at Pentaho. There’s been a bunch of developments at Pentaho (more open source features, key customer successes, etc), there’s been some interesting open source moves (licenses, alliances, etc), some interesting BI moves (vertica, hyperion acquisition, etc). Basically, I have a Blog Backlog of probably 25 or so juicy, page plusers. Things I would dig into, opine about, and hopefully help disseminate some useful information.
So… What’s the problem?
I just can’t. I’ve sat down and I look at my blog client and I just can’t seem to pick one, and write it. None of it seems worthy enough to be the first, or most interesting, or … Pick any reason, I’ve come up with it for why not to write on a subject.
Now that I’ve committed the cardinal sin of Apologetic Blogging (I aboslutely HATE reading blog posts entitled: Sorry I haven’t posted in a while) perhaps I should just turn it in. In fact, with so many people blogging these days it’s almost refreshing to hear “I don’t blog anymore.”
So I ask myself the question honestly: Am I done blogging? Is it worth the time? Is it worthwhile? Do I receive enough enjoyment from the writing to continue?
I don’t know. However, implicitly my next (possible) blog will answer that question, yes?
I am familiar with your situation. Currently when I login to my wordpress admin, I have about 10 something drafts which I thought were interesting at that point in time and needed more time to dig and create a useful article but they don’t get to publish stage. Recently I made it a habit to not save anything in drafts, just publish it anyways. If it is out, then it can be refined and updated and I feel it is working good so far 🙂
Guess what my New Years Rez was?
Yeap, haven’t blogged since, and I go to bed every night with all my feeds read!
YMMV but I’m much happier now.
I check in every few days to see what new insights you have. And I take time to go back through your past posts to find some new nugget of info. I purposefully don’t search because I’d rather find find something out there that I might not have thought to look for.
If you do stop blogging, your posts will be missed. I certainly enjoy them and find them interesting an read.
I can only concur with Nathan. Sure there might be a gazilion blogs out there, but there’s only a select few that I find even remotely interesting to read and you’ve been part of that selection for a while now.
I think that the effect you’re seeing is caused by something like a culture shock. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sure that coming back to the rat-race afther 2 months is not as easy as you might think.
Give it some time. The BI business we’re in is the most interesting branch of ICT and there’s plenty to write about, to flame, to admire, to diss and praise.
I can relate to your post very much. I’ve got a number of blogs I write for myself, but there seem to be periods where a single post can take ages to write. Especialy when it’s a more analytical or elaborate post on the toopic of BI.
On the other hand, I’m quite familiar with the effect since I have been wrinting poems for ages and there I also have had this writers block. It passes though…
I know the feeling. Sometimes it really helps to take a month off.
Pingback: Nicholas Goodman on Business Intelligence - Musings on reporting, OLAP, ETL, open source » 2007 was a desert of Blogging