I spent a very unproductive day at work, sifting through various blogs and getting willfully sidetracked by them. See, I've been writing about corporate blogging for about 6 weeks now, leading up to a presentation, and I think my brain is fried on the whole topic. I find myself suddenly thinking, "Hmm. This whole blogging thing is a fad. It won't mean diddly-squat to most businesses." Then I shiver with the fear of turning out to be like the guy who pegged the worldwide computer market at 5.
The main issue that turns over and over in my mind is how we have absolutely too much frickin' information at our disposal. It's insane. NYT. Salon. Blogs out the youknowwhat. Global news. Micro news. Vblogs. Email. Books. Podcasts. Newsletters. PDF manifestos. Tivo. It makes we want to scream à la James Brown. (Without the jump back and kiss myself part.)
Then I look down at Market Street from my 11-story window to watch the busses, people, cars and bikes go by, and I realize that all this crap really doesn't matter that much. That you can't stuff 9 bazillion books into your head. That whatever happens to the Internet, really interesting people will still be out there publishing their thoughts and photos for all to see. That I'm incredibly lucky to have a job that allows me to even ponder all this shit at all.
Anyway, I'm off to spincycle.
Snap Shots
6 comments:
Corporate blogging could really solve some SEC disclosure problems. When a CEO or CFO reveals some particularly important fact to a Goldman Sachs analyst, they quickly tell that info to some low-level blogger to post for full public disclosure. Interesting.
Don't tell me that "spincycle" is a new blog I haven't heard about yet.
Blogs remind me of going on a long vacation. After a few days I wonder what news I've missed. When I get back it turns out I haven't missed much at all. Sorta the same problem blogs suffer from. When I don't have time to keep up on blogs I like, it turns out I didn't miss much when I finally get around to reading them again (no dis intented).
Most likely it's because you don't read my super-interesting, always-updated, globally-important blog about my adventures on SF Bay. Did you hear I'm getting new sails?
Hi Tim
I think it's just a phase that you hit sometimes - you need to work through the pain...
It's all just words - and they are perhaps the most overvalued of communication, philosophical, religious, political etc. etc. devices.
I think that there's a real place for corporate blagging, podcats and wookies - we're just too far ahead of the curve still...
I'm not sure if it's a matter of there being too much information out there, or too much analysis of it.
Yes, there's statistics and data out the wazoo, but if you bounce around cable news or the internet, you start -- or at least I do -- to marvel at just how little news there actually is. The rest is all just editorializing. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing I guess depends on where it's coming from and how insightful it is.
But isn't that what journalism's supposed to do? Collect and display disparate facts in a coherent form?
I think that because there's so much data and statistics overflowing the collective wazoo people will purposefully seek aggregators (there's that damn term again) who match their world view. It's a more comfortable way to try and make sense of the world. Doing your own "journalism" requires intense effort to despin, detatch and decontruct all the blahblahblah.
So, that brings up the question: Are we really more well informed now? Or is it worse?
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