The labour of love and tough choices
Reading Robert Scoble's post this morning that he's giving up doing his link blog brings home in a very direct way some harsh reality about this blogging caper.
It takes up a lot of time! If you run a blog as a labour of love, you will face a crunch sooner or later as you try and juggle your love with the others things you do, professionally and personally, that enable you to earn your crust and actually have a life.
That's especially true if what you do with blogging has developed into something where you feel a strong sense of responsibility as others increasingly rely on the information you're offering, as is the case with Robert's link blog. When that crunch then happens, you have a dilemma and something has to give.
In Robert's case, he's had to make a tough choice:
It's becoming more and more clear that something in my life has gotta give. I've got about 1,100 emails waiting. Maryam would like to have me say more than hello and goodbye to her. My son is now showing me how to play bass guitar via IM and that sounds fun. I haven't seen a movie in months. My friends are getting ignored. The Channel 9'ers need their videos (and their foam nine guys, I have a bunch to send out). I have a book that needs writing. And then there's the link blog. I've been looking at my link blog, and the requests lately about it, and I've decided just to stop doing it.
Earlier this month, Shel and I interviewed Robert for The Hobson & Holtz Report. One of the things Robert told us about was the time he spends every single day on prepping stuff for the link blog:
[...] With the link blog I’m reading 3,500 items a night and I put about 100 items a night over there. So I’m just sifting through these 3,500 items a night looking for, you know, 100 things that my readers would be interested in, you know, and that I’m interested in really. [...] I’m just going through right now and actually do look at probably 80 percent of the items, even the ones with the bad headlines. A lot of people use such bad headlines that I just have to read through everything anyways!
That's quite a commitment. In his post this morning, Robert mentions that he's been spending three to eight hours every day on the link blog. And, he says, at the end of the day it just wasn't worth the effort.
Robert's link blog is an outstanding resource and I for one will miss it hugely. But thanks, Robert, for doing it for so long. I think you've made the right choice for the right reasons.
In my case, I've had a mini-crunch over the past couple of days. No, I don't do a link blog but, for the first time since I started this blog on TypePad last July, I've just had no time to post anything other than a couple of quick posts. Rather, my choice was - blog, or pay complete attention to work so that I won't be spending the whole of Easter doing that.
So, reality. Now I need to prep for today's podcast show with Shel, and try and finish that pending transcript of the interview with Steve Rubel...
Oh, I do love this whole blogging caper!
Perhaps a better solution would be to build a blog that relies on your own findings and creativity, rather than posting submissions from other people as 'your blog'. That way it will only grow as large as you can handle.
Posted by: David Russell | 26 March 2005 at 18:36