In the summer that struggles to arrive, I struggle to blog

A lot of people I ran into this past 12 months talked about it - the great blogging struggle. Some of them, who have a more entrepreneurial or consultant bent, have managed to keep blogging steadily even while picking up responsibilities to their audience in Twitter and Facebook. I, as you can see by my last blog post timing, fell far short of that.

Some of it I have to admit is the "twitter ate my blog" syndrome. I find myself with less time to think involved thoughts, and the temptation of the twitter candy is that you have your 140 characters of fun, and then the urge to publish has been banished - along with whatever complicated thought I might have come up with after that. Some of it is twitter honing my insights to what they really should be - only worth a fortune cookie's worth of expression.

Some of it has been noisy-ness and the act of keeping up with what folks are saying. I just finished re-reading Cognitive Surplus (Clay Shirky) and am about to start Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - and these are authors I've met and respect their brains. If I read every single social media book that claimed to give the marketer godlike powers, I'd have to quit my job and hire backup brains to help.  I also respect enough of the discourse that I try not to clutter it with my own stuff too much if it's a bit "me-too."

But some of what I feel emerging is some observations about being a tech person and being a marketing/PR person, and I'm not quite baked on the notion. I caused trouble with developers on past projects by bringing in customer data and I cause trouble in marketing circles by pointing out that the traditional media landscape is morphing. Aside from being a universal pain in the behind, there has to be some advantage to this dual view, and what i hope by end of summer is to be able to write here more on my findings while walking the periphery of both disciplines.

Cheers, and hope where you are, there's more sun than Seattle.