I Think, Therefore I Blog (Cogito Ergo In Araneam Scribo)

I realized that I have just passed the second anniversary of my first blog post, which caused me to ponder a bit about this relatively new vehicle for communication. This is fair warning: some of you may find this post to be self-indulgent piffle. If so, feel free to ignore it, but you have to swear that you've never followed any of the Twitter twits who engage in self-indulgent piffle all day, every day ("I'm driving to the airport" -- "I saw a car that looks just like mine!" -- "I'm at the airport now") - you know the type I mean.

A quick look back revealed that I've published 36 blog posts over the two years. That's roughly one post every three weeks. Frankly, that's less frequent than I hoped for when I started this endeavor, but of course we all have lots of demands on our time. I have become more diligent over this period, as shown by the following chart:

One factor that has reduced my blogging a bit is my adoption of Twitter; sometimes it's more timely (though less detailed) to tweet out a quick summary of an event rather than write a full post. On the other hand, the emergence of the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) and my passion for the success of this standard have fueled a lot of blog posts in recent months. I usually have no problem thinking of topics to blog about, but again there are a lot of things going on every day and a quality post takes some time and effort.

I've also found that I am using my blog as a substitute for writing external technical articles. I used to publish numerous articles a year in various trade publications but that's dropped dramatically in the last few years. Reduced travel budgets have also taken their toll on the number of conferences I attend, with the combined effect as shown in the following chart:

Clearly my effort has shifted from and trade publications and industry conferences to blogging and company conferences such as CDNLive! Probably half of my blog posts could have been expanded into full articles easily, but as I've said before the immediacy of the blogging medium makes it an attractive alternative to traditional publishing. On the other hand, I realize that key industry sites get more traffic (and thus more potential readers) than company blog sites. It's clear that I should try to balance these two parallel activities a bit better.

So what have a learned from this bit of self(-indulgent) analysis? The relative ease of writing a blog post with no effort needed to publish it beyond a quick request to our blog editor means that blogs can easily become the dominant method for external communication. There's nothing wrong with that, but blogs should be complemented by the immediate nature of tweets on the one hand and the archival nature of traditional papers and articles on the other. Your thoughts and comments (as well as any corrections to my Latin) are most welcome!

Tom A.

The truth is out there...sometimes it's in a blog.