It’s kind of like talking to yourself on the street. Does anyone hear you if you’re not addressing someone in particular? Is a personal blog a big waste of time? Or a creative way of talking out one’s own inner thoughts?
It seems like every second person has a personal blog - but who’s reading all this stuff? I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting blogs and occasionally come across some I like (see my favourites list) but these are the select one or two out of millions of daily posts and blogs and twitter feeds.
I like many people, have two main strands to my life - there’s my work about, and growing involvement with, the stories coming out of South Asia and then there are the two little Sujanlettes who pretty much absorb every moment of the non RNW related time. So is this blog about the first strand only? Should I not let the second strand interrupt at all, or do people like to hear about the hometime hassles of a harried single mother?
Yesterday, a friend called from New York - she’s an editor of a top lifestyle magazine, and puts in work hours that put the rest of us softies here in Europe to shame; after all, in that strata of professional life in the US, you get the kudos, the fame, the knowledge that you’re in the center of things, and a pretty good pay check. But you pay. You pay big time. My NY friend is struggling, more than most, to find a work life balance, and her 10-12 hour days can only be accomplished if she coughs up the huge amounts of cash it takes to have a well oiled machinery of nannies, babysitters, cleaners at your disposal. And now her boss wants her to start a personal blog.
She’s hesitating, partly because she doesn’t have the time, partly because she feels its an invasion on her home life. Our chat last night got me thinking about that. Should our employers be allowed to insist we start a personal blog? Is there a way of writing a blog that’s not an invasion on your personal life? Is it something that people want to hear about? Is there any point to it other than providing a process to work through the raw material of ideas rolling around in your brain? If anyone has some answers, I have plenty more questions.
on Jan 20th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
I find that simply responding to news blogs within a reasonable amount of time is challenging enough! As to should employers demand a personal blog from employees, definitately no. A short, quick on time releases based update is professionally sufficient for someone in your friend’s field of work. Blogs do have curious tendancy to land people into trouble through the environment of temporairily unguarded speech they may provide, so why lose a job over it? It is better to write a book after one’s career is completed if sufficient public interest is there for it to be so.
on Jan 31st, 2011 at 9:09 pm
I think its a wonder that there are people like you David, responding to blogs at all - there is so much media chatter, its a wonder that people even respond to them one on one. Just so you know that at least all listener / viewer responses are heard at our end even if it looks like a yelling into the void at your end. Heard and appreciated.