Bjorno.licio.us

Its been more than (exactly) a year, discounting 3 “out-of-the-blue” articles, since i wrote anything here. It sure took many efforts to overcome blogging inertia.

So, i randomly came up with a somewhat apt title of this renewed (hopefully!) bout of blogging… and to fit the title, i thought i might as well list whats changed since then till now…

From a Garden to the Wasteland.

My blog used to be like a garden of bountiful harvests, from job offers, attendees for my E27 unconferences, networking invitations, advertisers etc.. It was like Doraemon’s magic pocket, where you can pull a treasure out every single time to make one’s life better. Now, its become such a drag as its overgrown with digital “weeds” aka spam comments which only makes me hate blogging much as a lazy garden owner hated weeding.. Not to mention that i no longer get interesting projects or job offers or spare passive income…

From firing neurons to deadwood…

… my brain, thats what. okay, i hope not.

But its true that not blogging for such a prolonged period of time, IMO, slows down the creative thinking function of those of us who work in the attention-deficient web industry, where information overload and our longish times in front of radiation-emitting screens can conspire to dull some parts of our brains. When I blogged, i at least synthesized all the gigabytes of data i consumed everyday for a good hour– finding patterns in articles across my RSS feeds, mapping them into specific memes and then crafting them coherently in words… That kind of information synthesis is priceless. After I stopped, i felt no ill effect for the short term, but today, after a year, i do feel something’s real amiss.. like a slow-acting poison…

its one thing to write powerpoint presentations for a business audience and another to write a blog article for an uncertain global audience. while the pressure to perform might be the same for both, the frequency and unscripted, freewheeling nature of the latter made for a healthier brain.

Viral vs Word-of-mouth

thought i should share this anyway since its the best differentiation among the two seemingly similar terms in the marketing world.

“Viral marketing is typically reserved for programs where the advertising is talked about as opposed to the product itself.”

” Word of mouth is the actual sharing of an opinion about a product or service between consumers”

More here from Dave Balter of BzzAgent, a service thats trying to create media for word-of-mouth mktg agents that i am playing with recently.

Thats it. My first post in almost a year. Hope the next one comes faster than that!