My Evolving Blogging Identity Crisis

Here we go again. No soon­er do I announce Amor­tiz­ing Ryan Howard then I change the name (and buy the URL) for High Lever­age Inning. (Hey, it’s live!)

This isn’t the first time this has hap­pened and it prob­a­bly won’t be the last. Through­out my blog­gy tenure I’ve strug­gled with titles and plat­forms and chan­nels for this or that type of con­tent. Most of it falls under the cat­e­go­ry of, um, “flak­ing out.” Even when I’m putting off writ­ing about this or that, it’s real­ly hard to deter­mine what to put where. For exam­ple, we had a great trip to Mead­ow­brook Farm this week­end. I post­ed pics to Insta­gram and Face­book and tweet­ed about it a few times, too. Do I write a blog post wrap­ping it all up? So con­fus­ing! Most of all it’s about how much impor­tance do I assign my per­son­al stuff when I’m always think­ing about ways to improve what I’m doing with Com­cast Voic­es. It’s the qui­et strug­gle of the social media professional.

See, for those of us who start­ed writ­ing about stuff online in the ’90s, blog­ging is a real­ly spe­cif­ic thing, i.e. post­ing things to a weblog such as this one. We have dif­fer­ent names for every­thing else, whether it’s tweet­ing or tum­bling or what­ev­er. I see blog­ging as a species of writ­ing, where­as new­com­ers may see blog­ging as the genus and plat­forms like Face­book and oth­er social net­works as the species. Ulti­mate­ly it’s all con­tent shar­ing, but for those of us who enjoy writ­ing, even when we don’t write enough, we have these pangs where we admit we’ve neglect­ed our blogs.

Start­ing today I’m going to try to estab­lish some sense of what goes where. I prob­a­bly won’t stick to it, but I’m def­i­nite­ly going to try.

I’ll blog about what­ev­er pass­es my fan­cy here. That will con­tin­ue to be things that most­ly per­tain to fam­i­ly stuff, as well as the occa­sion­al per­son­al tech how-to’s and music-relat­ed things that grab my atten­tion. Cur­rent obses­sion? Instapa­per! Right now I’m sift­ing through arti­cles to help me decide if it’s bet­ter than iOS 5’s Read­ing List. I think it is, but it’s all a mat­ter of work­flow for me. Few­er clicks = bet­ter experience.

High Lever­age Inning will be where I com­pile all the base­ball-relat­ed items that catch my eye. I’ve tried Tum­blr more than once and now I final­ly feel com­fort­able with the medi­um. Also, if you want to be a Tum­blr rock­star, here’s a tip: tum­ble about sports. From what I can tell it’s a small sub­set of the greater Tum­blr com­mu­ni­ty and the folks who are doing it well are real­ly great follows.

Phew. Feels good to get all of that off my chest. Have to say that the evo­lu­tion from long-form blog­ging to microblog­ging can be a tough pill to swal­low. I love Twit­ter and Tum­blr, but few things are as sat­is­fy­ing as real­ly spilling words on the vir­tu­al page.

Any­way, thanks for read­ing. Let me know how I’m doing in the com­ments, okay?