Blogging Bliss?

Yeah right!! Now you see this is why I hadn’t started a blog- because I struggle to keep it up to date:-) There is all this stuff that goes around in my head and I think- hey I should blog that, but I just never get around to it. I applaud those of you out there who manage to maintain your blogs and blog regularly My mate Parso had somewhat of a similar dilemma himself a while back.  mrandypuppy said it was because he just needed to “go dark” despite being born into the modern world of multitasking and loving all things tech “like mobile phones, online messaging clients, email and Facebook (thanks for all those friends Parso on my recent Face Book listing). I Twitter, blog, run a website, run multiple messaging clients, have umpteen million email accounts.” Ultimately Parso was saying that at some point something has to give, at times struggling to maintain his various forms of connection to the world while actually living life.

And here in lies my challenge- keeping all my various forms of online comms up to date along with work sites (internal and external), living my life (there is no way I could keep up with a second life) oh yeah and there is my day job and I’m working away to set up my own business- another website!!! And no I don’t twitter!

So after a month of obsessing over the fact that I had posted nothing for a month and my blog was only 2 months old, it was somewhat timely that on a flight to Melbourne a couple of weeks ago I happened to be reading a Swinburne uni mag, that low and behold had a story on the front cover stating “Blogging is good for you”.

Well, I was intrigued “good for you”- really- the headline read “Blogging Bliss in online Oratory- A Masters project that found blogging to be quite therapeutic has triggered a global upswell of feel-good feedback” by Karin Derkley. The story discusses the online spread of an article by James Baker, a Masters student in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology and his research into the psychological effects of blogging- you can read the full article here. The overriding response is that blogging gives people the chance to connect with others like themselves- after two months subjects that had kept a blog rated themselves as less depressed and more socially connected than those who did not. The interesting thing was that bloggers said not only did they feel more socially connected online, they were also more satisfied with their offline friends and relationships as well. It seems the connections they made online had a clear spin-off to the satisfaction they had in their outside life”.

Well, clearly I wasn’t a subject, keeping a blog has had the opposite effect on moi. To me blogging, rather than being a social connector making me happier, is another thing to manage, maintain and update and causes me considerable stress when I realise that I haven’t done any of those things. I guess ultimately it depends why you blog- is it as an online diary, is it your quest for your 15 minutes of fame that could stem to eternity, is it as a platform for closet exhibitionists, is it for work, is it to share your knowledge?

So I hereby pledge to try harder to keep this site up to date- I’ve updated the Calendar of events and I have finally added the photos of Scruffy my once beloved monkey. Check back next month and see how I’m doingJ