Forget the Wills and Kate story, today’s big news in the world of web was Tom Harris’ announcement that he was retiring from blogging.
For those of you who don’t know Tom Harris, he is a Labour MP who has become extremely well-known in the digital world for his blog And Another Thing.
This blog was ranked in the top 10 UK political blogs last year and was the most influential of those written by actual politicians.
However, Harris has now publicly admitted that the stress that has accompanied his blog is forcing him to hang up his proverbial digital pen.
Blogging is having a negative effect on my personal, family and political life for reasons too many and complicated to recount.
Fair play to him for admitting to this, but the real question here is, should you actually retire from blogging or can you not just cut back?
We all know that many blogs go untended and often remain dormant for a long time, if not eternally. I know I’ve started a number of offshoot blogs over the years that have withered.
As long-term bloggers, it takes time, love and energy to keep a blog going continuously, especially if you’re not in it for the money (as few of us are), so if that has become an issue for Tom Harris, then fair enough.
He also indicates that the online vitriol that comes with any successful blog has given him cause to think twice about continuung, which is also fair comment – very few people can completely ignore nasty responses to something they’ve put time and effort into creating.
But completely retire from blogging? That seems possibly a step too far. If you get that much out of blogging, then there’s always the opportunity to scale back the frequency of posting or simply take what you do elsewhere.
I would question that, if you truly enjoy blogging, you can resist the lure of WordPress, no matter how much you claim otherwise. It’s like an itch you can’t scratch, especially if you’re high-profile enough to receive lots of feedback (both good and bad).
Harris himself admits that he’s ‘become a blogger who is also an MP rather than a politician who blogs’, so my question would be, why can’t you simply reverse the two?
Ultimately, only Harris himself knows how beneficial a life without blogging will be – it will be interesting to see if he revives his postings after a self-imposed sabbatical.
Love this new blog I stumbled upon today, in the vein of Stuff White People Like, but adorned with lovely images by the Barcelona-based illustrator (and blog author) Alex Noriega.
Some entries are funny, some are simply truisms, all look beautiful.
Go on, stick it in your RSS Feed – you know you want to.
- More Stuff No One Told Me
- More creative stuff on my Posterous
- Found via Holy Kaw
Posted via web from Rob’s stream of web
In spite of the furore over Nick Griffin’s appearance on last night’s Question Time and the running commentary provided by almost everyone I know during the show’s broadcast, it’s been a quiet week on Twitter.
Quiet, that is, when you compare it to last week. There has been acres of web space devoted to the double whammy of Twitter-power in the previous 7 days.
First, there was the now infamous Twitter campaign to embarrass lawyers Carter Ruck and their client Trafigura to lift the quite bewildering gag order on reporting in the House Of Commons.
Being part of the constant Twitterthon on Tuesday felt rather special. It was like going on a student demo without leaving the comfort of your own living room. Populace action using the web in a way that had previously been unimaginable.
And the Twitter community had only just recovered, when the second huge ‘scandal’ of the week erupted. Namely, the now equally infamous Daily Mail article, penned by Jan Moir about the ‘strange, lonely and troubling death’ of Stephen Gately.
My partner read it very early on Friday morning and said, rather presciently, ‘That’s going to cause a bit of a stink’. Too right – a stench that Jan Moir herself and the Daily Mail could never have imagined.
In an even greater show of strength than the earlier Trafigura moment, the Twitterverse went into meltdown. The level of astonishment at the column’s content was quite something to behold.
When a friend of mine tweeted that Moir had quite rightly breached the PCC code and forwarded the message to Derren Brown, the die was cast. His retweet flooded Twitter and the PCC was deluged with complaints – in itself a delicious irony given the relentless Daily Mail campaign against Ross and Brand last year – a number that currently stands at around 25,000.
Every development was noted. When the article headline changed and the ads were removed, tweets went round everywhere. When Charlie Brooker published his comment on the whole sorry saga, a link to his article achieved almost equal saturation.
But all good things come to an end. At lunch the other day with some friends, we noted how quiet it had been on Twitter this week, in comparison to the fire and brimstone of the previous seven days.
And we all agreed that actually a quiet week was actually really important. A sense of order and decorum has returned. Changing the world, or at least a couple of small parts of it, takes energy and emotion that cannot be continuously maintained.
Twitter needs time to gather itself before the next assault on freedom of speech and the erosion of liberal values. Let us get our breath back!
Forget the Wills and Kate story, today’s big news in the world of web was Tom Harris’ announcement that he was retiring from blogging.
