As regular readers will know, I had a bit of a blogging hiatus through December. Truth is I just got out of the habit. I got busy and my blog was the balancing item.
I suspect that this is the case for the vast majority of blogs out there. We start with good intentions but soon the next interesting thing comes along and today's brilliant, can't live without, new toy becomes yesterday's forgotten plaything.
Services like Twitter are designed to disseminate transitory information. I have signed up for an account but I really can't imagine anyone would find my random thoughts of interest, and anyway I can't really be bothered. The good thing about Twitter is if I say something that I subsequently wish I hadn't it doesn't hang around. It's forgotten in the sea of titbits about everyone's lives.
Blogs however are a different story. With their archives and syndication, once you've hit publish, that's it. This certainly makes me consider everything I'm posting and perhaps that's constraining the content and timeliness.
One of the problems with timeliness is access to a computer to make posting possible. By the time you get home, there are umpteen other things to catch up on before writing up the blog post you thought about while on the train, in the car, out at lunch.
In the past I've used my BlackBerry for mobile blogging, sending an email to this blog for editing later. When I remember to do it, it works pretty well, though I end up having to reformat and strip off the rather long (thanks to legislation) company email signature. We've recently launched BlogIt here at Esendex so people without email devices can do the same using just SMS.
While these services help to enable the physical act of blogging as and when the mood strikes I also think they require a bit of an attitude shift. I have to remember that every blog post doesn't have to be a long considered essay, it's perfectly legitimate to post something up as when the feeling takes me.
I probably should be championing mobile blogging via SMS as the answer with us running the BlogIt service, but in reality I'll use a mix of both. It'll depend on the situation at the time, what device I have with me, how long the post is, and whether I want to give it a bit of thought before posting.
The key point is that mobile blogging, be it by SMS or mobile email, gives me that choice. For something to become a habit, it needs to be easily assimilated into your everyday life. I spend a lot of time emailing and texting while on the move so now I can blog just as easily.
Expect to hear more from me.
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