SimonWaldman.net

…I can say I’ve started blogging again. There we go…tiny…steps.

Visitors to these parts will have noticed a distinct lack of activity recently.

In fact, until my link-splurge yesterday, I had said bugger all for a couple of months. And no-one, myself included, appears to have been any worse off for my silence.

And now I find myself limbering up to start again. Why bother, you might wonder.

Well, first it’s worth looking at why I ground to a halt.

First there is the time thing. I don’t have any. Grown-up job + three children under three = not a huge amount of time to think of pithy things to post every day.

This is compounded by the Facebook thing hell, after a hard day of adding and poking and generally doing whatever a man has to do to avoid looking like Freddie Friendless, what little free time I might have had has completely evaporated.

[It’s an interesting choice though - do you put your effort into your own space, or a communal one? But that’s best discussed another time.]

Next there is the confidentiality thing. Most of the things I’m putting most of my work brain to at the moment have to remain confidential, and this is much more true now at corporate HQ than it was while I was at the Guardian. I could tell you about them, but I’d have to kill you after. And that’s not what either of us want, is it?

And finally, there is the quality thing. rather brutal assessment of whether I actually have anything interesting/ useful or - heavens above - original to say.

This last point has become all the more challenging, because, there are now so many very fine bloggers out there, not to mention plenty of decidedly average ones.

I might spend a lot less time actually writing a blog - but I’ve been spending much more time reading other blogs. There’s a lot of them out there, don’t you know?

The big thing is that for everything that has happened from YouTube to Twitter and back again, the written word remains critical to the communication of ideas.

The written word’s dominance is only partly true, I have to admit. Although I’m not talking about the growth of audio and video: in the corporate world where I spend most of my time these days, Powerpoint rules. This is not simply the powerpoint of headlines and bullets, but smart elegant slides prepared by super brainy chaps and chapesses that analyse a market or situation or at a glance; or bring a screed of complex data to life.

Now, my Powerpoint skills have been sharpened over the years - [I did incidentally think of doing a blog entirely in powerpoint slides but ground to a halt in the middle of post 1], but my writing ability has become gradually dulled.

As a freelance hack a decade ago, I could bang out a 1,000 words in an hour or so. It was hardly Orwell-quality prose - but someone was at least prepared to pay me for it.

Now, it takes me forever to string a few sentences together. And I’m petrified that if I don’t start writing in some form or another right now…it’ll be all over for me. So it’s time to get going again.

And that utterly selfish reason, more than any other, is why I’m sitting here over my soup and salad plotting my return to blog land.

But what, you might ask, about the problems I raised earlier?

The time thing is never going to go away. So I’m just going to have to get over that and carve a little out.

The confidentiality thing is, I think, actually a flag that I should be putting a little bit more of my brain into things that aren’t in the here and now.

The quality thing is a real issue. But, despite the presence of a large number of UK bloggers, non of my peers - ie those involved with the business of new media within a traditional media owner - keep a blog. And this being despite the fact that most of them are about as publicity shy as Kerry Katona. So I should be able to bring something to the proverbial table.

That said, there is simply no way I’m going to start pushing out a continuous string of 100 - 200 word nuggets commenting on the days news. There are too many people who do that much better than me.

So here is my plan. I’m only putting it down in writing in order to shame myself in sticking to it. It is more than likely going to come back to haunt me.

1. I’m going del.icio.us mad. And selfishly so. I’m not interested in whether things have appeared elsewhere a thousand times before, or if they’re weeks and months old. If I’m filing it, it’s going to pop up on here. It’s for me. It’s not for you. But I’m just going to let it get posted up here on the off chance that you might find something interesting.

2. I’m going to try to write one piece a week. A sort of column. Just to give me a bit of focus. Maybe once every 10 days. Maybe two a week. You get the idea.

3. I have a side project which is nothing to do with work that is a continuation of (for those who remember such a thing) FiftyQuidBloke…but more of that after the summer.

In my general obsession with web stats, there is one chart that I look out for perhaps ahead of all others each queater - and that is the ‘Top 50 Blogs and MSM’ chart in Dave Sifry’s State of the Live Web (previously State of the Blogosphere).

It’s just as important for me that we do well on this as we do in our core site stats. When we talk about being ‘part of the web not just on the web’ - this is about as good an indicator of it as you can find. So, it’s good to see that we’ve bounced back up a few places since October back at number six behind the NYT, CNN, BBC, Yahoo and MSN.

Not sure what’s happened to TimeOnline there or the Telegraph for that matter. But, hey, that’s not my problem.

I know the point here is means to be the performance of some of the blogs on there (although it’s a lot less bloggy than in the early days), but I’m much more parochial than that. The things that always resonate for me are

* How the NYT despite registration, NYT select etc etc still comes right at the top of the table. No-one comes close.
* A clear ‘A-team’ that includes the BBC, but not, tragically us
* The remarkable presence of two UK names in the top 6
* The fact that the BBC might have 30% more inbound links than us, but they have about 1000% more traffic than us…

Ok - I had no idea just how bad it was, but having just deleted several thousand comments offering the usual mix of xanax, lesbians and - for some reason - amaryllis…have now installed akismet and hopefully all will be, well a bit better. I wont’ pretend this blog hums with comments..but if you have said something and find it’s been deleted in the purge..apologies.

Congrats to Matthew and his gang for pulling off a second Blogging4Business conference. Written up here by Richard Wray (and in copious detail over at Cybersoc)

On a connected point - I stumbled across this white paper from Lewis Pr on business blogging the other day. A bit late I know. And guess what - it didn’t suck. Lots of nice diagrams to pinch. Written up on their blog here. (and yes, I’m sure pretty much everywhere else - but I just haven’t noticed.)

I’ve never met him. If people I know hadn’t told me he was real, I’d think his blog was a parody and the man a myth.

I’m loving the diet , the car, the scooter, the treadmill (”We’re gonna attach one our old 24″ Dell 2405 monitors to this thing and put a keyboard and trackball on it so I can watch Law & Order, do email, and surf the web while getting not-fat.”), and the home phone system (”We need around eight phones.. I’m a fan of just using my cell phone an skype, but we need to be able to have folks buzz from the front gate”).

Late night ITV2 if ever I saw it..

Press Gazette has done a round up of the best journalism blogs. Now, there was once a time when I might have felt I should have been in there (not that I am, or have any aspiration to be categorised as a journalist)…these days of course, my - at best occassional whitterings - have no place in such esteemed company. I will simply enjoy the reflected glory of working for the organisation with most mentions. But anyway, the full list is.. (in their order..)

• Greenslade by Roy Greenslade
• Wordblog by Andrew Grant-Adamson
• Adrian Monck Online by Adrian Monck
• Cybersoc by Robin Hamman
• Sacred Facts by Richard Sambrook
• Vickywatch - by anonymous
• Online Journalism Blog by Paul Bradshaw
• Virtual Economics by Seamus McCauley
• Shane Richmond by Shane Richmond at the Telegraph
• Complete Tosh by Neil McIntosh
• AndyDickinson.net by Andy Dickinson
• Richard Burton by Richard Burton
• Strange Attractor by Kevin Andreson and Suw Charman

I suppose they couldn’t mention Press Gazette’s own Martin Stabe, but he deserves to be there (and covers it all on his site). Anyway - these days’ we don’t really read people’s blogs do we? We just follow their del.icio.us links in Netvibes…thank you Martin, Richard and David.