The Joy of Blogging

Okay, I fess up. Over the past few months, this site has been a mess. Columns have been late, updates have been somewhat random, and I grudgingly admit that the political stuff was a bit out of the scope of the what we normally cover here (not that I plan to quit writing about that stuff, though; I just have a new site, LiberalMedium.us, to cover it). I've been all over the place.

To be honest, I think I finally cracked under the deadline pressure. A weekly column, a deep depression and a slow news cycle in the handheld space makes Jeff a dull boy... Writing On Your Palm had become a Job, a Grind. I looked at future deadlines with trepidation, then despair. It just wasn't fun anymore, and I seriously thought more than once about retiring the site.

After the politcal tirades, one of my critics suggested I start a political blog to cover that stuff and keep it off the "tech site." While I still contend that it wasn't totally out of place, he did have a point, and Liberal Medium was born. And I discovered that I liked blogging. I liked the freedom of it. Blogs have no deadlines, no quotas, no word count minimums. You write about whatever comes to you, and you can let it come rather than chasing the muse down and beating it with a stick.

I enjoyed this spontaneous writing so much that I started another blog with my writing partner, something he'd wanted to do for a long time. Raving Media is a more light-hearted site mostly due to our subject matter. Raving Media covers media and other pop culture. We talk about movies, music, comics, TV, and just generally goofy stuff. Anything that reflects the weird and inexplicable species we are. And this, too, has been a blast.

In fact, after starting those two and seeing how freeing writing without a clock could be, I decided to return to a failed experiment. Writing On Your Palm would be the third blog in my growing media empire.

Long time readers will remember that I tried blogging on WOYP two years ago, but it didn't catch on. I think, in retrospect, two things were wrong with that attempt. One, I wasn't as good a writer then as I am now, and I was, ironically, far too mobile to be an effective blogger. I spend more time at home now, and when I do write blog entries on the go (as I type this seated at my local Chipotle), the entries are relatively short and simple, written in Memo Pad. I'm not, basically, overthinking it as much this time.

The other reason it didn't take off before was that I had a crew helping me out that really had too much of their own to do and I ended up carrying the weight of the blog myself. There was a lot of pressure to find something to post about every day, several times a day. (I think I was trying too hard to be Jason Dunn of Pocket PC Thoughts, and I ain't; I have a day job, whereas PPCT is his day job.) This time around my crew is Josh, my writing partner who already helped with the Zodiac review, and a few of the more active and prolific posters from my Yahoo Group. I know these folks can write, I know they have good insight on mobile tech and writing, and I know they have time to post since they have time to hang out on the Yahoo Group. Hopefully, this time around will be better.

I already know it's a lot more relaxing.