taking the fun out of blogging

As a law­yer, I under­stand the need for policies, pro­ced­ures, prac­tices, etc. when run­ning a busi­ness, man­aging vendors, employ­ees, etc. Of course. Sure. That’s part of work — both my work and the work of my cli­ents. But when I see an art­icle entitled “Blog­ging Policies and Best Prac­tices for Law­yers and Law Firms” well, gotta say, my eyes start glaz­ing over.

Not that there’s any­thing par­tic­u­larly bad or wrong about the art­icle. In fact, it offers some good advice on avoid­ing “eth­ical mine­fields”, cre­at­ing “power­ful mar­ket­ing tools” and ensur­ing you real­ize a good return on your “investment”.

Ugh. To be per­fectly hon­est one of the primary reas­ons I blog is not to real­ize a return on invest­ment, or to cre­ate a power­ful mar­ket­ing tool, but rather just to offer cas­ual obser­va­tions (or rumin­a­tions) on my work or things related to my work. In other words, its a bit of fun, as com­pared, for example, to writ­ing a formal research paper, journal art­icle, or a 100 page out­sourcing con­tract. For those types of writ­ing, there are many, many rules, require­ments and policies to remem­ber and adhere to, amongst other con­sid­er­a­tions. And rel­at­ively speak­ing, its not quite as much writ­ing that stuff as it is post­ing what are ostens­ibly mean­der­ing ram­blings about the next new thing. Don’t get me wrong, its cer­tainly inter­est­ing and chal­len­ging work, but its not the type of thing one typ­ic­ally does to relax.

I guess what I’m get­ting at is along the same lines as the pre­vi­ous post about mak­ing blog­ging part of someone’s job. Its kind of like say­ing that its part of your job to chat up your friends at work on a reg­u­lar basis. Its kind of like say­ing that there should be internal policies gov­ern­ing who you go to lunch with, and what you talk about over lunch. In other words, to me, it seems to take all the fun out of it. It makes it seem like work. It puts you in the mind­set that it is work. And, to be per­fectly hon­est, I think it makes it less inter­est­ing, because you’re too wor­ried about the time being put into it. Too wor­ried about whether you’re writ­ing for your “tar­get mar­ket”. Too wor­ried about “visu­al­iz­ing and address­ing your mar­ket”. Too wor­ried on mak­ing your blog sound “informal and con­ver­sa­tional”. Too wor­ried about this, that and the other thing, none of which have much to do with the sub­ject mat­ter of what you’re writ­ing about.

Of course, this is just my take on blog­ging and what I hope to achieve (or per­haps rather not to achieve) by doing it.

related:

1. you know its time to stop blog­ging when…
2. The ROI of Blogging