Martin Gordon's Blog

So it's about time I get back to posting here. I've been away from here for far too long, just shy of three months, longer than any other break I've taken.

My case of "noblog" wasn't isolated, however. Prolific blogger and VC Fred Wilson, had nothing blog worthy to say one day in mid-June, after finding something to write about every day for the past five years. Instead, he made a handful of posts on Twitter and Tumblr that day. As he put so bluntly, "I think its time to acknowledge that long form blogging every day may be coming to an end."

Other bloggers were also not putting as much down as they'd like. Russell Beattie, who took a year off from blogging before returning in April 2007, also found it difficult to keep up with a rigorous blogging regimen: "So I'm going to start blogging regularly again… A couple months ago, I was getting sick of blogging and decided to ratchet down the number of posts I wrote in some sort of attempt to change things up and maybe improve the quality of the blog. It didn't work."

So after an 8-post April and a 2-post May, Russell was back up to around 20 posts in June, about what he was doing prior to the two "slow" months.

Fellow Arsian Josh Bancroft not-so-recently wrote about how he wants "write more. Do more. Hack more. Learn more." In that post he writes on a topic that I've touched on a bunch of times over the years - making the transition from consumer to producer. I think Josh is way more on the producer side than I am, and his desire to move even further in that direction makes me think I could push myself a bit more in that direction as well.

That is not to say that I haven't been producing content just because I haven't been blogging. I've been twittering a whole lot more (although the number of tweets I put out fluctuates tremendously from day to day), and perhaps the number one enemy to my desire to blog is Google's "share with note" feature that they introduced in early June. Instead of linking to an interesting item here, I can just share the item and a few words to my Google Reader friends. It is much easier than preparing a post on a blog, for better or worse.

And of course there's the iPhone SDK. I've been working on a few ideas (for myself and others), one of which was finished just this morning and submitted to the App Store (more to come on that once the NDA expires).

Perhaps my hiatus was part of a more general trend towards something else (Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader Shared Items, etc). Even if that is the case, a personal blog feels, well, personal, and even if it doesn't provide value (or as much value as the aforementioned services) to the reader, it does provide quite a bit of value for the author, and I'll keep doing this until it ceases to do so (with month-long gaps at times, naturally).