The Pressure to Post Stuff

One of the things about having a website and a section called a “blog” is the pressure to post. It’s a pressure that has a lot of bloggers posting way too much stuff, too frequently and so we now live in a world that adds as much information in two days as it took from the dawn of time to 2003. Google’s Eric Schmidt said that and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it repeated at conferences. One of the reasons we’re adding so much information? Blogs. And the pressure to blog. Not all blogs are verbal diarrhea, not even close, but I’ve heard enough people say “I have to write my blog” that I can assure you there’s a lot of pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-my-ass kind of stuff out there.
You don’t have to write your blog. You should only add something to it if you need to. Not have to. It seems like a simple enough difference. Semantics. Content for content’s sake is going to drown us all if we don’t watch out.Writers write, not because they want to, but because they need to. They have no choice. It’s a compulsion. An addiction. But if I have nothing to say, I’m not going to bore you with an account of my allergies to cats. I mean, I could. But I’m a nice person. And I want this thing to have meaning.
Also: I had a bit of a neck injury. So there’s that. But that neck injury had nothing to do with the pressure to keep up the blog.