meish dot org: life, unfolding

I’ve got a number of friends who work in the same sort of industry as me (broadly: online media) and who blog eloquently and frequently about topics relevant to their work on their personal sites. In fact, some of them blog only about such things, to the point that the personal gets completely parked.

In a way, I envy them.

While I’ve been known to make the odd blog-type flutter in the direction of something professionally interesting (my musings on Facebook, for example), that’s ultimately not what this blog is about. See, this blog pre-dates (mostly) my professional involvement in digital strategy and social media (though my academic interest in online community pre-dates this blog (and any professional affiliation) by several years), and unlike blogs these days which need to be about something, this blog isn’t about anything (my stock answer when asked this question is that it’s about eight and a half years old), but is a filter for whatever’s going on in my head at the time: a Megafilter, an outboard brain. Sometimes that’s work stuff, sometimes it’s not.

Clearly, there’s a lot more going on relating to work than I ever talk about in these pages: partly because I’ve never really done so, and partly because it’s not really that relevant for the readers of this site. But for instance, in the last few months I’ve done presentations at the Don’t Panic Guide to Social Media event in London and the Association of Booksellers annual event at the De Vere Grand hotel in Brighton (thoughts and jokes about Norman Tebbit’s muscles kept dashing through my head during that one, but I resisted the temptation to share with the audience), as well as a seminar at the Online Media and Marketing show and two at the Arts Marketing Association’s annual conference at The Sage in Gateshead - an experience which was a blinder, both from a participation and location perspective (The Sage building is fantastic), and also because I got an ocular migraine towards the end of my second session, and consequently couldn’t actually see half the audience, or the stairs to the stage, or my presentation. Still managed to get through without issue, though I did have to go and lie down in a dark car for several hours afterwards, and then late the same afternoon went and bought an iPhone, which I must assume was some sort of delusional side-effect of the affliction.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time over the last few months locked in small rooms with technologists and whiteboards, which has been very fun, but rather draining and quite difficult to talk about or document in my usual social media ways. So I haven’t.

Why? Well, that’s the other thing. There’s not only a lot going on, there’s a lot going on that I just can’t/don’t want to talk about, even if I had time and inclination, which is a problem in itself. Not just trade secret stuff (though there’s a bit of that), but also stuff around strategic models for social media, approaches to community development, new journalism, and so on. Stuff that is absolutely tied up in my working life, and which I spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about, writing about…but not here. Because it’s for work. And this is my personal site.

Perhaps I’m ridiculously antiquated, but I feel like if I’m being paid to have and communicate knowledge and new thinking about a particular subject, within or on behalf of an organisation (or both), then giving it away on my personal site is a bit cheeky. It could be showing our hand, or giving away for free what I’m being paid for - the professional contents of my brain. But more than that - it could be interpreted as or understood to be the official company take on a particular thing. Worse still, my style of writing is blogging - I’m not a corporate communications specialist, and what I say on this site shouldn’t be taken as a company line or a corporate shilling.

I know there are people who are related to my work with The Guardian (e.g. community members, including the passionate GUTites) who occasionally read this site, and may interpret anything I say here about social media (general) to be a portent of changes under way specifically within the community offering on guardian.co.uk or the way we’re thinking about or handling social media. And as with blog posts, so with delicious links, or other bookmarks or found stuff that ends up in my digital scrapbook.

I’d love to write in more detail about my take on community development and management, and social media, and social networks and new forms of journalism and storytelling, but I feel this is probably not the place, and anyway, I don’t know where I’d find the time: I barely have time to write about cats and wibble, let alone expound on my theories of community management and experience adoption.

Can there ever be a site which combines public and professional passions successfully? And those people who write often and eloquently about work-related topics on their personal sites - how do they square that away with being paid for the same knowledge? Or keeping cards close to their chest? Plus where do they find the time?