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In Praise of Slow Blogging
October 25th, 2007Carl Honorgot on stage at Pop!Tech and spoke to my soul. Yes, I’m well aware that I’m being hyperbolic, and that it was more likely a case of the right talk at the right time. After all, his message to “slow down” isn’t exactly rocket science; my mother has been saying the same thing for years. Yet Pop!Tech was the next-to-last stop for me in a five-week personal travelpalooza. I’ve been on the road for 4+ days a week for over a month; in the course of ten days I’d been through Amsterdam, Hawai’i and finally, Camden, Maine. Maybe it was his sincerity, his humor, or perhaps it was just the slightest hint of the sexy accent, but at last I was finally ready to listen. Aside from the message to eat slower, cut out unnecessary trips and trim my calendar, what I heard Honorsay was: start to blog slow.
Let me be clear: I love - make that LOVE - the fact that I attend many of the same conferences as two of my favorite bloggers, Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani. These “twinbloggers” sit tirelessly in the back of conference rooms and crank out crystal clear renditions of the speaker’s presentations - in real time. Ten minutes after a session is over, while the rest of us are still catching our breath, they’ve posted an online record for the world to see (Ethan, while at Pop!Tech, wrote over 20,000 words in three days). Moreover, I’m grateful for the fact that they attend many more conferences than me, and so I reap the benefits of their parallel-processing brains; reading either one of their blogs is like getting a masters degree in global current affairs.
But.
Yes, there’s a but. Here’s the thing: I want to liveblog. I aspire to liveblog. But the truth is, I’m not all that good at it. I’m a futurist and as such I’m hard-wired to think before I type, to process things, to connect the dots and consider the systemic implications of any newly presented idea. Moreover, I invariably find that the most interesting people at any given conference are NOT the ones on stage, and so I instinctively spend my time meeting people and sniffing out the stories no one else is paying attention to. It’s also why I spend an inordinate amount of time talking to cab drivers, but that’s another story.
And as much as I admire Ethan and Bruno and the cadre of other livebloggers, I’m continually troubled by the sense of personal inadequacy and guilt (thanks, Mom, for the Catholic upbringing) that their presence initiates. The truth is: I can’t type as fast, I can’t think as fast, hell, I can’t LISTEN as fast as these guys. It’s a little like being at the local ice rink, casually skating around on a Sunday afternoon, and Michelle Kwan shows up and starts throwing out triple solchows.
Which brings me back to Carl Honor?, whose message I internalized as: “it’s ok to blog slowly.” If it takes me a few days (or a week) to let the ideas marinate and get my thoughts out, then so be it. I don’t know if the result will be any better, but at the very least I hope I will stop suffering from idea indigestion. And so, in my Pop!Tech haze, I make myself a promise to live less frenetically. I will practice deep breathing. I will do yoga. I will not get on airplanes before 6am. And from now on, I will slow blog. Thanks, Carl.
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October 26th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
What a great post! As somebody who has very detailed notes from probably 20 talks sitting on my laptop, I very much like your standpoint on this.
Here are some of the issues that I had while blogging Pop!Tech this year (and yes, I also love going to conferences with the “twinblogs” — Ethan even gives me a ride to some ;-))
a) making summaries of Pop!Tech doesn’t make sense — Ethan or somebody else will do it anyway– hey, don’t they now invite people to do this kind of thing for free anyway?
b) making summaries of Pop!Tech talks doesn’t make sense in general, because it doesn’t make those complex ideas much justice. No way I can communicate whatever Van Jones did on stage by saying “he spoke about green issues and, umm, jobs”. That was a performance. But not only that — those talks will make even more sense if we try to offer the reader much more depth about the issue rather than transcribing the speech word by word or just summarizing it.
c) The whole conference transcribing business, that I am myself often guilty of, is — I truly hope– going to disappear once Pop!Tech or TED will just use voice-recognition software to literally transcribe all speeches word by word and put them next to videos (hey, won’t that make that dotsubtitle job much easier?) So, this would be actually kill the whole summaries/liveblogging business.
d) what we are missing from the live blogging conference scene is really complex analysis — links to other ideas/blogs — the kind of interlinkage between ideas that blogs are good for. This would really add value even to those who came to the conference. I am not sure if Ethan would agree with me but in my viewpoint his best live-blogging is when he actually intervenes and makes personal comments (which he says he’s trying to avoid as much as he can– you shouldn’t!)
e) now, that usually requires a lot of research, prior preparation and post- and pre-conference thinking, which all of us going to these fancy conferences are probably capable of…
so yeah, I am still thinking what to do with my notes– may be I’ll just open them up next month and try to relate them to something else. a live-blogging conference mash-up would be a truly great idea
October 26th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
“a few days (or a week)” Most of the kragen-tol items have marinated for a year or more.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:18 am
[…] Verge Blog Archive In Praise of Slow Blogging A great reflection on Pop!Tech, inspired, in part, by my absurd blogging - a defense from Michele Bowman of the idea of slow blogging, digesting ideas instead of just reporting them (tags: blogs blogging mine poptech) […]
October 29th, 2007 at 4:49 am
I’ve met Ethan in Aljazeera Forum, I tried to keep up with him but in the end I give up. Excellent post.
October 30th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Thanks for sharing your insights into and experiences with “slow blogging”.
I, too, struggle with finding a balance between depth and breadth in my blogging practice. One of the many things that impresses me about Ethan is that he manages to do both (though perhaps at some cost, with respect to exhaustion).
My notes from Carl’s inspiring talk include a reference to “speed blogging vs. slow blogging” (and also to Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s mantra “slow down, let go”) … and just as Ethan’s posts reduced the pull I felt to post more extended entries on all the talks, your post satisfies my desire to post a separate entry on Carl’s talk.
For me, blogging is very much a practice of processing the stimuli I am exposed to - and I felt very much overstimulated at Pop!Tech. Like you, I take a slower approach, and yet I find if I take it too slow, I never get around to posting my notes (and reflections) … and thus miss the opportunity for processing. I suppose there is always a tension between input, processing and output - and between focusing on the past, present and future - but I do find that the events I blog about are easier to remember … not sure what’s the cause and what’s the effect.
I often feel backblogged, and find there is typically a narrow window during which I might blog about a recent event or experience … after which time other events and experiences transpired which supersede the unblogged ones, and so I rarely go back for further processing. So while I, too, praise slowness (in blogging and other dimensions of life, online and offline), I don’t want to slow down too much … but I have to admit that in writing that last statement, I’m wondering what the risk would really be in slowing down further. I guess I’ll stop writing, slow down, and reflect more on this.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:07 am
[…] In Praise of Slow Blogging“If it takes me a few days (or a week) to let the ideas marinate and get my thoughts out, then so be it.” […]
January 27th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
[…] asleep. Not only does this fellow NOT have permalinks on his blog (huh!) but he has linked to this terrific post by Michele Bowman, a futurist who writes at Fringe Hog, on slow blogging. Sounds like the States are crawling with […]
June 7th, 2008 at 4:53 am
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October 31st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Graet post mate. Keep them coming….