Yup, I’m lazy. This isn’t exactly a recent discovery, but it was reaffirmed this week when I joined Google+ and almost instantly started to refer to it as G+ in my speech. I’m just surprised I could so quickly resort to it by a short form. At least I could catch myself typing it.
I’m not sure if “G+” has made it into common usage yet, but I fully expect it will because I’m not the only lazy one out there. In his article Why I Blog, Andrew Sullivan refers to the tendency to shorten terms for the internet as the “monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet.” The trend to shorten everything in online language plus the fact that Google already has “Gmail,” added to the popularity of iEverything, makes me think G+ or something similar will soon become part of the internet vernacular.
I really enjoyed Sullivan’s perspectives on blogging. He mentioned many things I will have to mull over while I work on getting this endeavour going. One thing that really struck me is his emphasis on the immediacy of blogging. I always understood blogs to be a more immediate form of information and news sharing because of how quickly they can be put together and published, but I forgot about the editorial side. Now that I have written a few things that have had to go through a lengthy editorial process I can appreciate the feeling of freedom instant publishing gives an author. It’s also dangerous.
My professor (Dean Giustini) has been educating information professionals about and through social media for a while now. On his wiki, on a section of blogs he states “New bloggers should be cautioned about the pros/cons of blogging… They should be encouraged to proofread their entries before posting to ensure that they take this form of writing seriously.” Okay, so no lengthy editing process, but don’t go overboard with informality. Make sure you do a basic self edit. More evidence of my lazyness, I hate proofreading my own work. I am terrible at it. More often than not I will read over my own errors. Luckily, the format of a blog affords me a huge population of possible editors, whom I’m sure will not hesitate to pick out my errors. If that’s not motivation to do a double check before hitting publish, I don’t know what is. Sullivan makes note of the blogosphere editing, saying, “now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.”
Okay, so as I move forward with this venture there are a few things I have to keep in mind:
- PPP: Personal but Professional and Polite.
- People will read, people will comment, people will not always be as nice and diplomatic as I strive to be.
- Prompt. Write today’s thought’s today on things going on now.
- Point. Would I read it?
- Proofread.
3 replies on “I’m Lazy, Who Knew?”
The point about being prompt with your updates is especially prudent, I think, given how easy it is to become distracted by other tabs/windows and information tidbits online. Even just for this course, I’ve opened a TextEdit file with notes on articles and blog posts I’d like to refer to in my upcoming posts, along with scribbled notes on what I’d like to say about each one.
It’s scattered, even though it’s all in one place, and I completely get behind the idea of just writing the thing already rather than putting it off until tomorrow, or even until my thoughts on the matter have coalesced more. It’s okay for posts to be a bit of a work-in-progress, although it might be hard for some of us perfectionist grad students (ahem, I’m really referring to myself here!) to accept that.
Ha, I also came down here to comment on the ‘P for Prompt’ idea, as I belatedly compose a blog post I started a few days ago. Promptness and conciseness is something I definitely need to work on during this class. I like to (or rather, can’t help but) mull over my words a lot before committing them to the internet. Even this comment will not escape an overabundance of hemming, hawing, and proofreading.
Ditto to previous comments – I mull over something and think “ah, this shall be my next blog post” and then it sits there and no longer becomes current. My next blog post title has been in my head for the past 3 days. Definitely stale.
Proofreading? What’s that?
Okay – I am guilty too. I sometimes edit my posts over 10 times over many days because I keep spotting errors here and there. One additional thing I keep going to my posts to edit is tags. I change and change my tags or add more. It drives me crazy.