After spending three weeks in academia, with no time to read newspapers or watch the news, let alone be active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and such, it’s been interesting getting (slowly) back into the swing of things. Today, in between researching topics on peer-reviewed journals for a paper I have to write, I caught up on some blogs. (Er, can you spell “procrastinate,” class?)

I’ve been neglecting blogs, and not just my own. Looking through my feeds, I see several blogs that have 200 posts I have not read, nor is it likely I will get to them. The ones I do read regularly — and make sure to catch up on during times like this — are written by people I know, feel I know, like and respect, or that make me laugh or are related to work or inspire me. It seems the ones that fall into the category of 200+ unread posts are the ones that just post too darned often. And yes, every day is too often, no matter how brilliant you are.

But having time to write for and read blogs is all a matter of maintaining balance, something my team tackled in a group presentation we had to do last week for the Public Speaking course (go Team 3!). We took the position that cramming the extra 15-20 hours of work that will apparently be required of our BA program is doable. We tried to make it clear, though, that adding extra schoolwork means adjusting time spent elsewhere, not taking away family time or neglecting our health. After all, if Canadians typically watch about 22 hours of TV a week, how difficult can it be to pry ourselves away from the tube and instead hit the books?

By coincidence, one of the blog posts I read today touched on the very topic of balance. The always inspiring Colleen Wainwright, Communicatrix, suggested shared an update to the instruction often given by agencies and independents: “Fast. Good. Cheap. Pick any two.” In other words, if you want it good and you want it tomorrow, be prepared to pay extra for it.

Colleen suggests credits the hilarious David Sedaris (writing in The New Yorker) for the “Four Burner” model worth aspiring to: “Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three.”

The idea is not that you can’t have all four; Colleen says, “it’s that you can’t have an exceptional level of all four at once.” So if you are a workaholic, and your family and friends are important to you, then maybe your health is going to suffer. Or if family is everything, one of the other three is going to get a lot less attention. Or, you’re going to keep juggling all the balls in the air by merely doing the best you can, and that’s fine. Her advice:

“Pick one to hit out of the park or pick a life that lets you gracefully enjoy a bit from the sampler plate of all four. Pick, though. Pick today, and then pick again tomorrow…”

The key here is making it a thoughtful choice.

(In case you’re wondering, the photo above is the bridge in the Japanese garden at Royal Roads University in B.C.)

Toronto-area independents, join the Halton-Peel Communications Association next week for a peek under the blog hood!

HPCA’s social media expert Rob Clark will discuss web analytics, and his colleague Kyle McKeown will talk about inbound marketing and search engine optimization. A couple of HPCA guinea pigs (including me) have offered their web sites for closer inspection.

The event takes place Wednesday, May 26 at the Halton Region Museum, 5181 Kelso Road in Milton, ON (at the Kelso Conservation Area, between Appleby Line and Tremaine Road just south of the 401). Networking starts at 6:30 p.m. and the presentation runs from 7 to 9 p.m.

The event is free to HPCA members and only $20 for guests. Guests, please book your spot online.

See you there?

While countries around the world worry about swine flu (sorry, H1N1), I’m here to tell you there is another insidious virus sweeping at least the blogging world. Yes, some online Dr. Evil is secretly going around stealing our mojo.

You know you’ve noticed it. Some bloggers you follow simply don’t post as often. Others have replaced blog content with their running Twitter commentary, or they select links found on, again, Twitter for a “best of” round-up. (Not a bad idea, and one I may shamelessly steal borrow.) A Google search on “lost my blogging mojo” pulled up 714,000 results.

Yes, I’ve lost my own blogging mojo. It appears to have started slipping away during a frantically busy week leading up to a week off in San Francisco. Once back in town, the pace continued, and between my freelance writing business and networking/volunteer activities and personal life, I would find myself shutting down the computer at 11:30 p.m. and thinking, “I’ll blog tomorrow.” Or before writing a post, I would just “dip into Twitter,” which quickly ate up my allotted non-work time. Meanwhile, Dr. Evil cranked the Mojo Vac on high and “tomorrow” kept getting farther away.

When I launched this blog in January 2007, I worried about getting into a regular rhythm of posting, having found it difficult to keep up a hand-written journal. But for the most part, I managed to maintain a regular two- or three-times-a-week schedule. So I know if I can only get my mojo back, I’ll be good to go.

If you’ve got any advice for getting blogging mojo back, I’d love to hear it. And if you’ve seen my mojo, let me know. If I see your mojo, I’ll be glad to do the same.

Have you noticed lately that the bloggers you follow are posting a little less frequently?

For me, there’s a direct correlation between deadlines looming and a slowdown in both reading and posting to blogs. I’m disciplined about working when I have to be, and time online is the first to go when I have a lot on my plate. So at times like the busy weeks leading up to a week away on my mini-vacation in San Francisco and then attending the IABC conference, I did not have much to say online.

But something else is getting in the way these days:  Twitter.

Kelly Thul at CommunNtelligence recently voiced that same thought, in a post called “Cheating on my blogging with Twitter”:

“I have resolved to get back to posting to a couple of blogs that I have neglected lately. Trying to understand how I got there. Was I lazy? Sure, always a bit, but that is not it. Did I run out of things to say? Unlikely. I blame Twitter.”

Me, too. First, you spend time scrolling through tweets from everyone you follow to see what they’re up to, and maybe answer or retweet a couple. Then, you have to look at all the interesting URLs they’ve suggested. Next, you might share a few URLs of your own, or come up with something about what you’re doing. And maybe you have some new people following you, so you look at their profiles to see if you want to follow back (or maybe block them, if they appear spammy or in other ways suspicious).  And then, oops, look at the time, better get to work! And so you leave blogging to another day.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter has its appeal. As Kelly notes, it’s easy and quick, and it’s short. And I think those very attributes encourage a quick comment, which helps to build a connection. People seem to be a little less likely to comment on a blog post, especially if the comment is a one-liner (within Twitter’s 140-characters).

But it’s still an enormous expense of time. So here’s my new plan. If it’s been a few days between posts, I’ll blog first, and not even launch Twitter or (the much nicer tool) TweetDeck until that’s done. Or tweet one day and post to my blog the next. And if I’m super busy, I might not get to either.

How are you achieving blog/Twitter balance?

Everyone is trying to be like the shiny new toy, Twitter.

My Internet service provider, Bell Mail, has launched their new “enhanced” mail service, and it wants me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing. LinkedIn and Facebook want me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing. The Air Miles loyalty program just announced a new “community” and invited me to pick my user name and join in, sharing travel and Air Miles reward stories. No doubt, they also want me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing.

But Twitter is the place everyone seems to want to be.

The thing I’ve noticed lately is that people who are busy Twittering are slowly neglecting other parts of their online life. They aren’t updating their blogs as often, or they’re letting a Twitter feed take the place of posts. Twitter comments (yes, I know they are called tweets) are replacing Facebook status updates.

An article by Michael Learmonth in Advertising Age asks, “Why did Facebook suddenly get so much more Twitter-like?” He notes that Facebook “started emulating key functions of Twitter earlier in March after a redesign made status updates central and immediate,” but that “The tweet is replacing the status update among the digerati.”

Not everyone thinks this is good. I ran across Carpe Media and Emily Sussman’s musings on the back-and-forth Facebook encourages by letting people comment on friends’ status updates. She says:

“Unlike Facebook, micro-blogging on Twitter strikes me as the equivalent of shouting into a vacuum…Essentially, Twitter posts are graffiti while Facebook’s status updates function as a dynamic community bulletin board — the latter succeeds because of its context’s fully interactive interface.”

Twitterer kevinrose asks, “is personal blogging dead? w/my facebook page/twitter, I’m not sure I need a blog anymore.”

Do you agree?

Akismet has stopped more than 36,000 spam comments from being posted on my site over the two years I’ve been blogging, a milestone reached yesterday. (Happy anniversary to me!)

I scan through the “holding pen” every once in a while, and usually the spam is obvious. But recently one of the stopped messages took a different approach, boldly promising to “post your promotional message on millions of forums worldwide.” It actually said, “No, this isn’t spam email. It’s penetrating online established communities…” Right, you can generate 400,000 “unique” forum posts, complete with a link to your web site, but it’s not spam. Good luck with that one.

I also ran across something else recently that seemed to be a new form of spam. I was contacted on Facebook by two people I’ve never heard of, wanting to be friends. Here’s a tip. If you want to befriend me and I don’t know you, or it’s been a long time since we’ve encountered each other, write a line explaining where you got my name or where we met and why we should connect. Otherwise, I’m assuming you’re a spammer. Am I wrong?

Digital natives won’t be impressed, but it was big news for me when I launched my web site, started a blog, got settled on Facebook and LinkedIn and even downloaded a ringtone (I’m not a big cellphone user). So believe me when I say there is LOTS for me to learn.

I had wondered before how to link my blog posts with my Facebook profile, and today Dan York pointed the way. As he notes, it’s quite simple once you can find the Import tab. Turns out it is cleverly concealed under the little triangle beside Write Note. Of course, he’s got so many possible places to link that he’s sorry it only lets you link one.

Joan Donogh of In Formation Design, who designed my web site, also  revealed that you don’t need to see an RSS button on someone’s blog to subscribe. Just look up, way up, at the line that shows the URL of the page you’re on. If there’s a feed, you’ll see a little blue RSS feed icon. Click on that, and you’ll be able to subscribe.

Of course, YOU knew that, but I did not.

What things have you discovered lately that you’d be somewhat embarrassed to say you did not know before? Chances are, I don’t know them either!

Hello, all you lurkers! Over the past couple of weeks, I was pleasantly surprised to find out about several people who are following my blog. Even if you aren’t necessarily saying anything, it’s nice to know you’re out there.

When my friend Gloria launched her Escarpment Views blog, she said, “Publishing a magazine is a bit like putting a message in a bottle. It’s surprising where it ends up.”

Blogging is a bit like a message in a bottle, too. You have no idea what shores it’s going to land on and who is going to pick it up.

Hey, if you pick up the bottle, drop a message in it yourself and send it back!

Mitch Joel says there’s never been a better time to start your own blog.  Technorati says in its State of the Blogosphere/2008 report that “blogging is not dead” and “blogs are here to stay.” The report also notes that bloggers have been at it a average of three years and are collectively creating close to a stunning one million posts every day.

I feel like saying, “So there.”  When I started blogging in January 2007, some indicators made me feel I was late to the game. Well, I was, compared to the early adopters (who are now spending more time on Twitter), but few of my friends beyond my communications colleagues have joined the bandwagon.

In 2007, the Gartner Group said they expected the total number of blogs to peak that year around 100 million. Here it is 2008 and Technorati’s report cites a study estimating that 184 million people have started a blog. It says “Blogs are pervasive and part of our daily lives.” Can’t you almost hear the buzz, like the background noise at a party?

So if you haven’t launched your blog yet, it’s not too late. Join the party. As Mitch says, “Don’t be fooled by the few that are looking at the next shiny object.”

A colleague in one of my networking groups, Rob Clark of The Elusive Fish, once likened social media to being at a party. He suggested that just as we would at a party, we need to get out and talk to people.

Jean Gogolin (in her WordTales blog, found through links from other bloggers), suggests basically the same thing when she encourages those of us who lurk on blogs to comment. As she says, comment to learn, to become part of a community, to meet compelling people, to add your point of view and more.

I can’t tell you how many times another blogger has (virtually) introduced me to someone else I have found to be funny, smart, interesting, entertaining and with plenty of wisdom to share. Why wouldn’t we let those people know how much we enjoy their words? Why not let them know their words aren’t wafting silently through cyberspace, unseen and unheard?

I was already following Copyblogger and Seth Godin, two of the blogs Jean cites. But she introduced me to the hilarious Naomi Dunford and her Ittybiz (“Work from home tips to help you stay sane”), where I found and ordered Naomi’s cleverly named How to Become an SEO Ninja. I can’t remember where I heard of Danny Evans’ Dad Gone Mad (“this is your brain on fatherhood”) or Quinn Cummings’ QC Report, or Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist (“advice at the intersection of work and life”), but I thoroughly enjoy all of them.

I’ve probably doubled the number of blogs I follow based on mentions from other bloggers or people commenting on them. That’s both a good thing and sometimes not so good, as in when I get distracted from my appointed tasks by reading, following links and, usually, having a good laugh. However, you could say that’s good, too. What day isn’t enriched by a good laugh? And I’m pretty focused when I have a deadline to meet.

My friend and colleague Donna Papacosta at Trafalgar Communications is always very good at commenting, even when I happen to know she’s crazy busy. So I promise to work on my tendency to lurk and do likewise; comment where I have something to say.