Yes, I Know, I Am a Blog Addict! There! Now I’ve Said It! So What?

Tags: Metablogging, Blogs, Blogging Style, Brevity, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Learning, Collaboration, Blog Addiction, Mingle, Syndication, Twitter, Community

I knew that I would be coming around this one at some point in time, indeed. After four years of actively weblogging in several different places, I had to admit it, once and for all: I am a blog addict! There! I have said it! At least, that is what Mingle thinks about me when I went ahead and tried to answer the question How Addicted to Blogging Are You? According to the test itself I am 88% addicted to it and without a remedy, I suppose:

88%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

I guess I never thought I would have scored that high, although I still see that there is a staggering 12% left to be able to say that there is no cure for me any longer! 🙂

Last week, you probably noticed how, due to the different Internet connection problems I had, there was some light blogging for the first part of the week. Well, I guess you always have to look at the positive side of things. Those first three days of being disconnected from everything gave me a great chance to do a massive catchup with all of the different pending RSS / Atom feeds I had (Some of them from as far as March 2007!). Ouch!

Yes, that is right, in those first three days I went through over 42,000 articles, news items, blog posts, etc., you name it! and while going through them, it just made me realise about the huge amount of different conversations with some really great topics related to KM that have been going on out there and which I kept neglecting over and over again, not going through them soon enough.

That got me thinking, indeed, as you may have guessed. They say good weblogging is all about linking, linking, linking, i.e. getting out there and dive into the different conversations that are taking place, instead of just focusing on your own weblog. I guess that is basically what I have learned while going through those several thousand entries. Somehow I have the strong feeling that I have been linking, indeed, but perhaps not often enough. Too much stuff going on out there that I should have been aware of, but that I didn’t get a chance to chime in when I could have.

Perhaps, lately, I have been placing too much focus on this particular weblog without looking out there for some more interesting stuff that is going on at the moment. Well, time for a change, then, don’t you think? Yes, I think that today is a good day to get things started, now that I am fully recovered from my Internet connection problems from last week. So here it goes.

From now onwards, and for the next few weeks, I am going to be running a little bit of an experiment and a change in the direction of my own blogging style and see where it would take me. Perhaps nowhere, perhaps where I should have been all along. Don’t know, we shall see. Time will tell.

As a starter, and this coming from someone whose candid feedback I really appreciate a great deal! (Thanks for that, J.!), from now onwards weblog posts are going to be a lot shorter than what they have been lately. Yes, I am going to keep things short and sweet and see if I am able to get the message across in the same way. I know I am not doing a good job with this particular entry, so there may be the odd long weblog post here and there, like this one, but they are going to consistently get shorter and shorter, although perhaps not at the level of Twitter‘s 140 character limitation, if you know what I mean 😉 heh

Secondly, then I am going to be linking to a whole bunch more conversations that I should have tapped into a while ago, but that I didn’t. Now it would be a good time to get things going. There may also be the odd day where I will not be sharing content over here directly, but more commenting on other people’s blog posts and I may make a quick reference to them so that you get to check out where I have been hanging out.

And, finally, for those weblog posts where I am going to keep things short, I am actually not going to be including any of the pictures that I have taken from the places I have visited or where I am currently living. That way I will not divert your attention from those shorter entries and every now and then I will share separate weblog posts sharing some highlights from the places I may have visited or checked out further, like I used to do till not so long ago.

Thus with all that said, I think it is a good time now to stop and let that blogging addiction kick in again, continuing to put together some other posts to share over the course of the next few hours. Oh, and since you are an integral part from this particular weblogging experience, I would really appreciate if you could share a comment or two on the new direction I am taking, whether you like it or not, or whether you would love to see something else in here. Let me know (Offline would work, too!) if I am on the right track … or not. After all, remember that this is a two way conversation and without your feedback I am not going anywhere! And probably that blogging addiction would die out at some point in time, too! Are you going to let that happen? I am not… 😉 heh