It’s an odd feeling, to suddenly lose touch with something that has been so much a part of your life for years. Blogging, and more importantly, reading blogs has been part of my professional routine since about 2004. I’ve taken time off, but it’s only been for a short time. Every time, it feels weird.
I’ve been a bad blogger for the past couple of months. The twelve-or-so hour days I’ve been working for the past month as we put together a major project at work put my conversation with the blogosphere on hiatus. I read (skimmed) a lot of the blogs that I normally read, but I had no real time to respond, to engage or to really think critically about what’s going on in the profession.
It felt weird, too. It felt like I wasn’t on top of my game. Like I wasn’t up-to-date. Like I wasn’t part of the conversation. In short, it made me realize how valuable this whole blogging thing is to what I do every day. No, it doesn’t directly influence the minutia of my day most of the time, but it certainly effects the lens through which I view it.
This feeling tells me a lot about what blogging really is. It gives a whole new layer of understanding to why I’m so consistently annoyed when people talk about blogging’s ROI, or try to put this exercise in any kind of business terms, really. It’s roughly the same as trying to quantify the ROI on human interaction. You get benefits from it, but I don’t know how you could put it in financial terms… and I really don’t care to.
Anyway, the long and the short of this is that I’m happy to be back to the conversation. So… did I miss anything?
