Saturday 14 June 2008

Blogging: Quick Update on where I am and how the 15 minute burst is working

I now have 4 blogs up and running: my original hobby blog Colins Beauty Pages, a cut down blogger version of the same, a blog for essays about the links between the fiction of J.R.R.Tolkien and history. I have also started writing for a blog about the town I live in, i.e., Petworth. Traffic to the Beauty Pages is still healthy but doesn't seem to be growing very much. The others are new and have virtually no content so not surprsingly aren't generating any traffic at all yet. I have had two hits on theTolkien one, but they were probably just random servings up from the blogger platform. Basically it is much too early to tell whether any of these are going to be remotely successful yet. What have I learnt so far? The thing I am really pleased with is that the 15 minute burst approach to writing articles works really well. I find that I can generate enough ideas in 15 minutes to come up with a reasonable sized post. The unexpected side effect is that I find it makes my writing style a lot choppier and punchy than normal. I think this works well for the web. I have just been reading an essay by Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Me Stupid? where he complains that Google is making him stupid. He has lost the ability to concentrate on large bodies of text and whole books as a result of using the internet a lot. His attention span has diminished. Actually I don't not what conclusion he came to because it is quite a long essay and I gave up before I got to the end of it. But he makes a good point. Browsers don't stay on a web page for very long so you don't have long to make your point. It is also very satisfying to get to the end of the 15 minutes and know that this a task you have completed and is not going on the to do list. It gives a great sense of completeness. And as my last minute approaches, there I must end.

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