My friend Dale did a brave thing at work today.. she blogged about blogging.. She was blogging on our company’s internal blogosphere.. which is alike a tiny copy of the outside world.. a kind of cool fish bowl. Actually, she wasn’t talking about blogging per sec.. She was actually talking about not blogging.. or the things that kept people from blogging. she identified three main things: Fear of the unknown, Perception of being uncool and Under developed capabilities. It was interesting to see how much resonance this got with folks in the few hours I watched after its posting. Quite a few folks dropped in to comment that they were afraid of blogging.. which is interesting to me.. because commenting isn’t all that different from blogging.. is it ? The most common thread was that folks were self conscious about their writing..whether it was content or form. . .. again.. a very interesting concept to me.. I’m certainly self conscious about my writing when I’m doing a technical paper.. but. for some reason.. I’ve found it very easy to write here.. .. .. her’s what I said:
0Dale,
LOL.. this is great that you’ve put yourself out there and blogged about blogging. 🙂 I think you’ve nailed some of the major things that stop people from writing. .. No one likes to be judged.. For that reason, putting yourself on record online is … well… scary !
For me the big secret that got me beyond that fear was to write for one person.. .. ..and that one person was me ! That helped me get past the worry about what folks would think about my poor grammar and dyslexic spelling (Dale.. you’re laughing now, I’ll bet 🙂 . I found that there’s no better way to figure out what i was thinking about than to write it down. .. and I have blogged every night for the past nearly 6 years in that spirit. (http://johncohn.org)
I submit the same is true here at work.. write for yourself about what you’re passionate about. Don’t worry so much about what others will think.. Don’t worry about your style .. People will be happy to learn from your thinking if not your punctuation .. 🙂
-jc
reading that now, i wonder if i was too flippant.. I’m not saying that I don’ care about my readers.. its’ that I don’t think you’re there.. . if i did, I’d never write another line.
nite all , nite sam
-me