Writing, Not Writing, Thinking About Writing

I have quite a complicated set of criteria for writing what I write on this blog.

My first criteria is value. Is what I am writing of some value to someone. It might just be of value to me – helping me to construct a set of thoughts. If I’m trying to construct these thoughts then perhaps others are too. It might be something I’ve found that I think others would like to know about and it might be a set of opinions that I want to express.

That’s the positive side, but I also have a set of criteria for things that I avoid writing about:

• I won’t write about something that I am currently being directly paid to work on. I’m never going to write about a customer’s project. That’s not the purpose of this blog and would potentially ruin my relationship with my client.
• I won’t write about something that is “mainstream” and by that I mean that I am not going to write about something in blogs like lifehacker of ReadWriteWeb. They are paid to do a good job of covering their information, anything I say is just adding to the noise. If I have an opinion to relay I may say something, but I’m more likely to do that as a comment.
• I won’t write about individuals. The internet is far to severe a place for me to write about someone.
• I won’t write about my employer, I’m not paid to blog and I don’t have a mandate from them to blog. It’s a personal activity, so I’m making personal comment.

All of these criteria leave me with a lot of grey areas; where it’s grey I’ll always err on the side of caution and not write.

I also won’t aggregate into my blog all of the other stuff that I contribute to on the web – del.icio.us it visible as is twitter, but I’m not going to copy them in as posts. The same with flickr, and facebook. If people want to connect with those streams then they can do so by the appropriate mechanism. The other reason why I don’t do this that I’m just duplicating the number of times many people see the same piece of information. I’m considering turning off notifications of my blog updates in twitter for this very reason; I regularly read the same piece of information twice which annoys me, and probably annoys others too.

I write lots of stuff and only some of it appears here. This probably makes my online persona difficult to pin down, but it’s only ever going to a part of who I am. I think that I need to do a better job of showing people where I’m contributing, but I don’t think that aggregating it all together into a single stream is the way to do it.

A spend a good deal of time pondering whether I have the balance right; I’m still not sure.