Category Archives: Writing

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How Badly Has Your Online Writing Impacted Your Offline Writing?

Do you still write offline at all?

You know… using one of those pen or pencil thingies and some type of non-electronic media? Like, oh, maybe that wild concept known as… (gasp)… paper?

Personally, I’ve been writing in journals for literally decades. In fact I recently opened a box and came across a couple of my journals from back in the 1980’s. I have many of these floating around in various boxes.

Writing is just part and parcel of what I do and who I am.

But, of course, like most of us these days, my writing has been increasingly online.

I started “blogging” (although it wasn’t called that yet) back in May 2000 at a site called Advogato and have continued on through LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress to where I routinely write across about 15 or so different blogs and sites. Every work day (and often weekends, too) usually starts with writing blog posts and often ends with writing posts. My brain is always firing with a zillion ideas of what to write about… my constant struggle is to find the time to write all the posts I want to write.

What is losing out in this battle for time, I’ve found, is my offline writing.

The truth is that the vast majority of my writing is “public” and so it’s perfectly fine online. In fact, it is better that it is online because it is much more easy to find… it is searchable… it is easy to “back up” (if I do so)… and in some ways it probably has a much longer lifespan than my offline journals, should, for instance, they meet with our wet basement. (Of course, the contrary might be true int that they may outlast some of the online sites hosting my content.)

But there are some topics I don’t care to share online. Some of them are more “personal” thoughts… some of them are sketches for ideas for future stories – not yet ready to be put online… some of them are notes about our kids that I want to preserve for us, but don’t want to share with the world. I’ve also been writing poems for years and they, too, are not yet ready for me to share online (or more precisely I am not ready to share them).

And sure, in our culture of “transparency”, many people simply dump ALL that information online somewhere… maybe on public sites… or maybe in private sites… or in walled gardens like Facebook. I’m not personally ready to be THAT open.

I didn’t quite realize, though, exactly how much my offline writing had been impacted. On a recent weekend, I opened my current offline journal and leafed back through the pages. I was rather shocked to realize that I began this particular journal in October 2006!

Almost five years ago.

Go back a decade and I probably would have filled up a journal like this one in a few months… and here it’s been five years and I’m maybe only 2/3rds of the way through it.

An amazing change…

How about you? If you ever wrote offline before, do you still do so? Or have you moved entirely online? Have you seen a drop-off like I have?

P.S. And with that drop in offline writing, I’ve also noticed that my cursive handwriting – never terribly legible – has declined even further without the regular usage. 🙁

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Do You Have A Favorite Time of Day To Write? (And What Happens If You Miss It?)

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Do you have a favorite time of day when you like to write your blog posts or other online content? What happens to you when you can’t write during that time?

Yesterday (Wednesday) morning, I found myself just a bit jittery in the morning and seemingly out-of-sorts. I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on… and then it hit me:

I was missing out on my “normal” writing time!

You see, my wife is recovering from breast cancer surgery and during this period she can’t do things like, oh, lift up our 2-year-old daughter and change her diaper! Or simply hold our 2-yr-old if she falls … or just wants to be held. (Needless to say, this is immensely frustrating for my wife!) Or reach up into kitchen cabinets to get plates or glasses. Nor can my wife drive right now with her limited range of motion.

The result is that for this week my mornings prior to 9am have been spent getting both kids ready and off to camps or friends. (Our 9-year-old has been in a day camp and our 2-yr-old has been visiting each day with friends or family.) Plus all the other typical morning activities in a household.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I am definitely glad to help in doing all this. My wife has been making an amazing recovery and each day she’s getting better and better. It’s no big deal for me to do what I’m doing to help her out – and I’ll keep doing it as long as she needs me to do so.

What I didn’t expect was the disruption to my own habits by starting my work day one hour later.

Here’s the deal… for years now I have always started my formal “work day” around 8:00 am. And yes, I’m often checking email and Twitter, etc. before that time… but 8am has generally been the time when I go “into my office“.

And what’s the first thing I do when I go into my office?

Write!

Indeed, I have formally blocked off 8-9am every morning on my calendar as “Blogging Time“. It is a time when I try my best to just FOCUS on writing.

Before getting sucked into the zillion Skype group chats that are part of my IM-centric company.

Before getting sucked into my email inbox.

Before getting sucked into the mega-timesuck that is Twitter/Facebook/Google+/whatever.

Before getting sucked into whatever Voxeo projects are on my plate for that particular day.

Before any of that… I try… to just spend an hour where I’m entirely focused on writing.

Typically my focus is on cranking out at least one post for Voxeo’s many blogs and then often a post for one of my many other blogs. My goal is to try to always have a queue of posts that will be going out over time to keep content flowing out online. (Confession: right now with everything going on, I don’t! My queue of written posts is empty – tons of ideas, no text!) Sometimes my focus is on an article for some other site… regardless, I try to spend that time writing.

Sometimes that block of time stretches on beyond an hour… maybe it turns into a couple of hours. Sometimes it winds up only being 15 or 20 minutes before something high priority interrupts the time.

This week, though, I haven’t had that block of time in the mornings. And to my chagrin I’ve found that this does have an effect on me. 🙁

Now, the effect on me will be temporary as next week we don’t have quite the same schedule of camps and such and I’ll probably be able to resume my early writing block. And if it’s not next week it will be the week after…. or somewhere in here as my wife keeps getting better. So I’m not too concerned in the grand scheme of things.

But this whole episode has made me realize just how important that little block of time has become to me!

How about you? Do you have a favorite time of day to write? Have you formally blocked out a period of time? Or do you just try to catch some time when you can? Does it bother you when you can’t write?

Image credit: kobiz7 on Flickr

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Is Blogsy the iPad blog editor I’ve been seeking?

Do You Need to Hit The Publish Button RIGHT NOW?

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Publishbutton Do you need to publish your blog post right when you finished writing it? Right at that precise moment?

Or could it wait to be published for an hour? or a day? or even a week?

Could there be a better time to publish this particular post? Or a better day of the week?

When you finish writing a blog post, it is tempting to just hit the “Publish” button right at that moment because, well…

you’re done!

Or at least… you think you are.

You want to just get the post out.

Move on to the next post coming out of your brain.

But when you are about to hit that button…

STOP!

For just a moment… and ask yourself…

Does this post NEED to go out right now?

Maybe it does… maybe you are breaking some news or chasing a topic that is breaking on a site like Techmeme…. maybe time is critical. Maybe you’ve set a personal goal and need to hit it (been there, done that).

But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe if you let it sit overnight or for a day or two you’ll have some additional insight to add. Maybe you’ll see a better way to word the post if you look at it again later. Maybe you’ll spot that typo that you just didn’t see in the heat of writing the post.

Maybe you can instead schedule the post to come out at some future time. Instead of having a spiky publishing schedule where posts come out at whatever random moments you write them, you could have a more consistent schedule where posts come out every day or every couple of days.

Most blogging platforms have a scheduling feature, and there are even some great tools like the Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress (see also another review I wrote about it) that give you a view of what you have coming out when. (I use it and definitely like it.)

Admittedly, I struggle with this concept myself… it is soooo tempting just to press “Publish” and get your content out there… but if you pause for just that moment, it may in fact wind up working out better for you!

What do you think? Do you schedule posts? Or do you just hit Publish? (Or will you now try to schedule some posts?)

P.S. This post was in fact scheduled for a future time… even though I was sorely tempted to just hit that dang “Publish” button!

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

One Day of Content Creation: Dec 1, 2010 – 16 blog posts across 14 sites

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Building off of something I did the first time back in July, I decided to see if I could fit in writing across as many of the sites where I can write as possible. Why today? Partly to celebrate C.C. Chapman’s new book, “Content Rules”, and partly because… well… it’s December 1st and so it seemed a good way to kick off the last month of 2010!

How did I do this time?

Today’s tally is 16 blog posts published across 14 sites. And, unlike last time I did this, today was not only about writing. Today’s content also included a set of photos uploaded to Flickr and a video podcast. (And in the time it took me to create, edit, render and publish the video podcast I probably could have cranked out 2 or 3 written posts!)

With that… I’ll get this post up in the final minutes of the day… and put this “One Day of Content Creation” theme back on the shelf for maybe another six months or so. 🙂

For the record, here are today’s posts… (and yes, the VoiceObjects Developer Portal post is listed as December 2nd because the server goes off of the time in Germany – and it was already “tomorrow” when I posted the piece there)

Personal Blogs

Disruptive Conversations:

Disruptive Telephony:

Now We Know What Happens When The Skype Group Video Free Trial Expires…

Code.DanYork.com

Python heading up O’Reilly’s recent book promotion?

DanYork.com

Photo Set: Autumn 2010 in New Hampshire

Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks:

Read the book? How about posting a review on Amazon?

Voxeo Blogs

The Tropo Blog

Voxeo Talks:

Want to speak at eComm America 2011 in San Francisco in March?

Speaking of Standards:

Internet Architecture Board (IAB) Seeking Comments on “Evolution of IP Model”

Unified Self-Service:

Slides available for yesterday’s Jam Session on building Twitter apps

Voxeo Labs:

Want to understand Phono? Tropo? Voxeo Labs? Listen to this podcast!

Voxeo Developers Corner

Miss our webinar on building Twitter apps? View the recording and get the slides and source code

VoiceObjects Developer Blog

How to link VoiceObjects to IMified to create apps for Twitter or IM/chat

Phono Blog

Using the WordPhone plugin for WordPress? Upgrade to version 0.2

Emerging Tech Talk (video)

Emerging Tech Talk #58 – Book Review: Pragmatic Guide to Git

Blogs I did NOT update

And as the day draws to an end, I see there are still more blogs/sites that I did NOT update… simply not enough hours today: 🙂

Next time…

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Cleaning Out Your Queue! (of blog posts)

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Do you have a queue of blog posts waiting to be written? Do you come across great articles on the web and say “I should write a post about that!“? Do you scan your Twitter feed or Facebook NewsFeed each day and see 10 different links you would like to write about?

Do you wake up each morning with your head exploding with stories to be told?

What do you do with all those story ideas?

Do you…

jot them down on a piece of paper? In a Moleskine, maybe?
save them as bookmarks to a service like del.icio.us?
save them in a service like Evernote?
save them in a text file on your local system?
record them as “to do” items in a task manager?
leave the links open as tabs in your browser so you can find them? (which works great until your browser crashes)

What do you do to build your queue?

My own way is a bit of many of those. I’m a big user of Things for task tracking on my Mac and so I’ll write in there of posts I want to write. I use a keyboard shortcut to copy the URL into the notes of a task. I also will save bookmarks into my del.icio.us account (yes, I still use it) and have a special tag there I use for things I want to write about. And yes, I do leave links open in various tabs in my browsers. I also write almost all my posts offline using MarsEdit and so I will actually have a local queue of partially written posts right there.

BUT… the key question is…

DO YOU EVER CLEAN OUT YOUR QUEUE?

This is honestly something I struggle with myself. Each day I probably have 15 new ideas for posts … and time to write maybe 3 or 5 (or less). The queue I have stretches on to hundreds of post ideas… some of which are quite frankly no longer really relevant now that so much time has passed since I wrote them down. In talking to some folks about this, some suggestions are:

SET ASIDE SOME TIME TO REVIEW YOUR QUEUE – AND WRITE – I’m trying to block out a couple of hours each week where I just go back into my queue and try to pound out a couple of posts. I might even reach back to something 6 months old that I still think is worth sharing and commenting on.
SHARE YOUR QUEUE – Sometimes the question you have to ask yourself is: What is more important? That the story be written? Or that you write about it? If there’s something that should be written about and you just don’t see realistically how you are going to have the time to write about it… share that idea. Tweet about it… post it on Facebook… send an email out… pass it along to others who you know write on the topic. Get it out there. And then… remove the idea from your mental queue. Let it go.
PURGE YOUR QUEUE – Sometimes there are stories that just lose their value with time. Writing about how excited you are about the latest iPod Nano may no longer be relevant in 6 months because Apple will already have come out with a new one. So carve out some time to just go through your queue (in whatever form you keep track) and discard ideas you just won’t have time to deal with.

The important thing is that you take the action of starting to do something about all those queued ideas. Otherwise, as admittedly happens to me sometimes, you can start to get overwhelmed with all the stories you want to write – and the lack of time you have to write them.

What do you do? What strategies have you found that work for you in dealing with all the ideas you have?

Image courtesy of pedrosimoes7 on Flickr.

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Where have all the bookstores gone? The move to e-books and the changing book distribution model

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Do you still shop in a bookstore? Or do you buy your books online at sites like Amazon.com? Or have you ditched print books altogether and now read “e-books” on a reader like an iPad or a Kindle?

The New York Times is out today with a piece about the changes at Barnes & Noble and also about changing consumer trends in general that is worth a read. Interesting stats on the changes in buying habits:

In the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period in 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcover books, grew to 8.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, spurred by sales of the Amazon Kindle and the new Apple iPad.

As an author, but also as simply a lover of reading and of books, I do wonder about where we re going. If I look at my own behavior, we have two large bookstores here in Keene, NH. One is a Borders branch and the other is a local Toadstool Bookshop. Both are great places to browse books… Borders has a coffee shop/cafe area and WiFi. Here’s the thing, though:

I almost NEVER go there!

Part of it is that I don’t find I have time in my daily life to just go and browse through books. Maybe I should make that time… but I don’t… and I don’t see it happening soon. The other reality is that as a ~~cheap~~… er.. “frugal” Yankee, I just don’t want to pay the higher prices of a bookstore when I can get the exact same book for less online, particularly once you get sucked into Amazon Prime and can get a book delivered so fast.

I’ve also bought more e-books this year than ever before, largely because I now own an iPad. I had purchased a few before for my iPhone or desktop, but the reading form factor wasn’t that great. The iPad is great for reading… and again there’s a price factor. I bought a bunch of O’Reilly books I’d wanted not too long ago when the ebook versions were only $5.

An interesting aspect of e-books (or are they “ebooks” or “eBooks”?) is the ease of receiving updates. Just today I received an email from O’Reilly that there is an updated version of one of the books I bought that has a number of corrections and fixes. Pretty much impossible to do with a printed book, particularly because they wouldn’t know I had bought it. (More anonymity with print books… a subject for another blog post.)

Now, there are a host of reasons why I personally still like print books… “tree-ware”… I’m not yet cool with the idea of “cuddling up in bed” at the end of the night with my e-reader. And I just like the feel of a book in my hands. But I can see the day coming…

How about you? Do you go to bookstores anymore? Do you still buy books? Or have you shifted to e-books?

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One Day of Content Creation… 16 posts across 13 blogs

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Lately I’ve been a wee bit frustrated by not writing as much as I have wanted to. As a writer, there’s a bit of twisted dynamic that goes on inside your brain… it’s almost like you MUST WRITE… or else you just feel, well… blah. I’ve been feeling that way a bit lately. With all the other responsibilities of life/work/etc, I haven’t made enough time to write.

So as I went for my morning walk this morning I said to myself… “you know what, I’m going to write a post in ALL of my current blogs today.” And then… so that I wouldn’t back down, I posted that statement to my Facebook account. 🙂

I knew it was going to be a crazy, busy work day as we’re in the midst of preparing for a impending trade show, product launches, publicity campaigns, and everything else… but I said, “Perhaps I can squeeze some posts off during various moments of the day.”

Turns out I was able to do it! Sure, not all of them were big or important posts… a few were longer and detailed… others were short posts or update – but hey, they were posts!

I also discovered in the process that what I think of as my “current” blogs consists of some 14 blogs (2 of which are actually podcasts). I hadn’t actually counted for a while… so it was a useful exercise for that purpose. There’s actually a few others where I could write, but I don’t any more. In any event, it’s actually quite a lot of area across which to spread my writing.

I’ll have to do this again sometime… it was actually kind of fun.

To prove my statement, here’s the list:

Personal Blogs

Disruptive Telephony (link)

Disruptive Conversations (link)

One Day of Content Creation… 16 posts across 13 blogs (this post)
Frustations with TypePad: Hideous trackback URLs – and inability to easily link between sites
The Skype/Fring dustup and the importance of quick blog – and comment – response

DanYork.com (link)

Speaking on UC Security at SpeechTEK in NYC, Aug 2-4

Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks (link)

Another great Amazon review of 7 Deadliest UC Attacks…

Advogato (link)

Entry for July 15 (about Tropo)

Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast (link)

Dan’s new book: Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks

Voxeo Blogs

Voxeo Talks (link)

Slides: Voxeo’s Unique Business Culture

Speaking of Standards (link)

Two new SIP-related IETF Working Groups: LSD and SALUD

Voxeo Developers Corner (link)

Want to learn VoiceXML? Visit www.vxml.org

Unified Self-Service (link)

Free Webinar coming up July 22: Providing Self-Service Through SMS Applications

The Tropo Blog (link)

Are you on Facebook? If so, you can join the Tropo conversation there…

Behind The Blog (link)

Suggestion for a WordPress plugin to publish posts to a Facebook Page?

VOIPSA Blog

Voice of VoIPSA

Unified Communications Security Presentation at SpeechTEK NY, Aug 2nd

Current blogs I did NOT update

Emerging Tech Talk

Wellllll, this is actually a video podcast, so maybe I can escape on a technicality… but the truth is that I have the next episode queued up to be released with an impending announcement – and I have to wait for that. Putting up a show today would have meant either: 1) posting a show with an out-of-order sequence number; or 2) posting a show with the next number and then pulling down the queued show and re-rendering and re-uploading with a new show number. The amount of work with #2 didn’t seem worth it and #1 is too strange for me.

dyork.livejournal.com

As of today I am going to stop thinking of this as a “current blog”. The reality is that I don’t write there any more and I want to leave the current post there at the top so that people who do find the site know how to get to where I am currently writing.

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