What Should I Blog About? Have Your Say [en]

[fr] Une expérience: faites des suggestions et votez sur les prochains sujets que vous aimeriez que j'aborde dans ce blog! Anglais et français, bien entendu. 🙂

This is an experiment, utterly and totally ripped off from what Scott Berkun is doing on his blog with his Reader’s Choice series.

As many of you know, my problem is not finding ideas to write about. My problem is that I have too many. I have a long list of blog post ideas in Evernote which I dip in every now and again when I feel like blogging and don’t have an immediate idea (which is not that often, to be honest — not the “feel like blogging” bit, the “don’t have an idea” one).

So, here’s the deal. I’ve opened a Slinkset site called What do you want to read about next on CTTS? — I’ve started populating it with my blog post ideas. I would like to invite you to vote on the topics and add your own suggestions. You don’t even have to sign up, it’s really easy!

A couple of times a month, I’ll make sure I blog about the most popular topic. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works 🙂

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2009 Has Been a Good Year For Me [en]

[fr] Bonne année! Le cru 2009 a été excellent, je me réjouis de goûter 2010!

2009 has been a very good year for me. I expect 2010 to continue in the same direction, and be even better.

With that, I will soon have written my first post for 2010, and am therefore freed of the worry to say something meaningful to start the blogging year (which will mark the 10th anniversary of this blog, by the way) — be it about what 2009 meant for me, the world, or worse, what the last decade was about.

10 years ago exactly, I was in India, and that seems like yesterday and a long long long time ago.

Your normal programme here on CTTS will resume shortly. Happy New Year everybody!

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More Musings on My Blogging [en]

I’ve been a blogger for the better part of my adult life. At 34 this summer, I’ll have spent 9 years of my life writing in this blog (which started its life as Tara Star’s Weblog) — and you can add to that an extra year of online publication experience before I discovered Blogger.

I have never really tried to accomplish much with my blog: it’s really mainly a place for me to dump stuff in written form, reaching a certain number of people who happen to read it every now and again. Though I do try to “think of the reader” to some extent when I write, it’s probably obvious to most of you that I have not put a huge amount of effort into tailoring my blog to make it as successful as possible (define “successful”, while you’re at it).

In that respect, I’m a bit of an anti-ProBlogger. Not that I have anything against Darren at all — he seems to be doing good stuff, but… well, I guess I just can’t be bothered.

The result, I’ll admit, is that CTTS is not exactly very reader-friendly: long periods with nothing, then spurts of posts during a week or two, huge long unreadable essays, and don’t get me started on categories and cross-post navigation in general. It also doesn’t do the best job it could of showcasing my writing and expertise (as my most valuable or important stuff is drowned amongst the over 2000 posts).

So, in a way, despite the modest success CTTS has attracted over the years, I tend to consider myself a Bad Blogger. Not that I don’t know how to do it (I do it for my clients pretty well)… but I wouldn’t say I’m a role-model 😉

All this to tell you that I’ve realised, again, that the less you blog… the less you blog. Specially when you have a tendency to write long-winded essay-like posts that take days (or at least a full whole day) to write. Blogging, for me, used to be about jotting down quick tidbits, Tumblr-like, and I keep having to drag myself back into that here on CTTS, because otherwise I just remain stuck not writing posts about Big Ideas and Serious Research. When I do things, I like to do things well. It’s a disease some call perfectionism, and it gets in the way of doing things — I’m mostly cured but I relapse regularly.

When I don’t blog, it’s not that I’ve run out of things to say. It’s usually that I have so many things to say I don’t have the time to do it properly. So I don’t. Because maybe a part of me would like to be a Good Blogger, writing well-researched and well-built posts, and Getting It Right.

Once again, then: back to the messy writing you’re used to see around here. Oh, and if you have suggestions for 20 or so categories in which to sort my posts… I’m listening.

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