How to Blog Carefully

(I've had several unrelated conversations about blogging in the past couple of weeks. Thought I would share....) There is much information about how to blog in order to get bigger audiences and win acclaim in the blogosphere. However, it is a much trickier proposition to balance blogging with a professional life. Some advice:

Blogging can be a wonderful thing. You can meet people, vent, respond to elites, and have fun with writing. These are private, but tangible benefits.

Blogging can also have benefits professionally. You can network in a much broader context than your typical workplace. I have been able to discuss my academic interests with a smart group of people both in and out of academia and learn from others in an interdiscliplinary context. You are able to leverage your experience and knowledge to respond to current events and hot button public debates. You are able to hone your writing style, get feedback on theories, learn what people are interested in, publicize ideas, and be part of a larger dialog that may shape real world events. All good things.

However, you have to be very careful. You have to work twice as hard as everyone else at your job, because it can't appear that blogging is a distraction. Women often have to minimize their family commitments in the office for the same reason. It is possible to blog too much, if only for appearance sake. Everybody has their hobbies outside of work -- fishing, golf, photography -- but the hours spent on those activities are a mystery. With blogging, your workmates have a rough idea of the hours that you spend on your non-work responsibilities. As useful as you may think your blog is, your workmates probably don't share that notion.

Be super careful about the content of your blog. This is standard advice for everyone. Don't blog about your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers. Don't blog about anything that will cause controversy at work.

If you have a professional persona, make sure it corresponds to your blogging persona.

Blog moderately. Don't spend too much time on it. Don't piss off others in your profession. The trouble is that if you do those things, you won't attract huge audiences. Blog readers prefer the intemperate. But at least, you'll keep your job.

Comments

[Julie G.]

Hmm.

I find it interesting that you blog about not blogging about family even as you then post a picture of Viking Ian.

Although it's hard to resist a Viking (I know, I married a Norwegian, even if he is shorter than most and came to me via Wisconsin).

As a wanna-be kind of blogger, though, I appreciate the advice!

[laura]

I didn't mean to say that you shouldn't blog about your kids. That was just a bad sentence on my part. Blogging too much is sort of like going into the office and talking about your kids too much. People think you aren't professional.

I actually think that blogging has been great for me, Julie G., and highly suggest that you do it. I've learned a ton. But not everybody understands the benefits of it. I heard a lot of trash talk this week about blogging. Just don't talk about it too much with your colleagues.

[Timothy Burke]

Basically, your advice about how to sanely integrate a blog into your life is exactly counter to "how to have a blog which has huge numbers of readers". (I'm totally on your side on this point, obviously.) In local news, if it bleeds it leads. In blogging, if it's stupid and intemperate and biased, it gets tons of links and comments. Someone starting a blog needs to understand that point. If you're doing this to express yourself, and you're a basically sensible person, understand it will take a very long time to build anything like an audience. If what you want is the biggest audience in the shortest time, you'll need to play a super-sized ultra-wanker version of yourself.

[laura]

heh. It might be fun to start up a blog with an alter-ego and really test that theory, Tim. Just for experiment sake. I think I could hit five thousand a day, if I put my mind to it. I think the ultra-wanker version of myself would be a huge hit.

My concern of the day (and this might pass) is that even normal, rational blogging isn't really appreciated in our profession. If you don't have tenure, one should proceed super carefully. I think people tolerate blogs, as long as you don't appear to take it too seriously.

This isn't stop-the-presses sort of advice. We've all heard it many times. I'm just more skittish than usual lately.

[Suze]

As someone who will be looking for a high school teaching position for the fall, I’m really careful about my online presence in general. I think any suggestion of even a future possibility of inappropriateness could easily sink one’s chances. So for me, no Facebook page, no guest blogging, only the blandest of LinkedIn profiles, commenting under a pseudonym. I’m contemplating a sideline online business though, one in which blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. might be useful tools, and commenting productively on certain sites could prove helpful, but I’m trying to figure out how to balance anonymity with building credibility in a business. Maybe a pseudonym is the way to go.

[Julie G.]

Laura -- talked to one of your colleagues last night and got a sense of some back story. Totally get where you're coming from......

Funny, I've told so few people about my blog. No one at work. Advice well taken.

[Doug]

Collective action problem here? Blogging is not a big deal, but if everyone is scared of their boss, potential boss, dean, overseer, whatever, it's always going to remain a bit suspect?

The first proposals for the WWW date to 1990; the Web went live in '92, Mosaic was released in '93. It won't be long before your students were born after the Web was going. It's already been around all of their conscious lives.

Publishing on the internet is no longer any sort of revolutionary act. Institutions that think it is reveal the symptom of much larger problems.

[laura]

Different back story, Julie. This is a bar conversation.

Doug, I think that institutions don't see it as revolutionary. Rather, they see it as childish and a time waster and unprofessional.

Suze - I have never heard of anybody having a problem with Facebook. If you are going to maintain a business, then facebook, twitter, and blogs is terribly useful. However, juggling a side business along with another career is going to land you in the same problem. Your bosses aren't going to perceive you as serious and committed. At the same time, you cannot maintain your side business with a pseudonym. At some point, you may have to choose.

[Suze]

Somewhere around here I've got a file of articles about teachers who've gotten into trouble for things they put on Facebook or other networking sites. Whether they are firing offenses is highly questionable, but an administrator would almost certainly be loathe to hire a primary or secondary school teacher with a lot of personal info or perhaps controversial opinions out there for minor students and parents to see. Of course, if I limited my blog theme to "Yay, American Literature!" then not a problem and maybe even a plus.

As long as you file the appropriate DBA forms, there's no reason you have to disclose your real name on your site, so I'm not sure why you couldn't maintain a business using a pseudonym (first name only, say). If the biz isn't linked to your teaching persona, there's no commitment perception to worry about. Time management is its own problem, of course.

[Julie G.]

You know, the more I think of this, the more silly I think it is for academics to have to worry about such things if they are talking in the frame of being public scholars. I've seen newspapers bemoaning the demise of the public intellectual. It seems to me that blogging is a great way to get back into the swing of debates that engage scholars to have real word relevance.

I suppose several problems come up. One is that the medium may excite other faculty who think it isn't *proper* scholarship and that it is a waste of time from what faculty members should be doing with their spare time (writing articles). But the other is the mixing of the private and the public, which I can see can have a deleterious effect of the image of what it means to be a *professor*. But with students posting classroom gaffes on youtube, the latter seems to be on its way out anyway, with or without Facebook or personal blogs.

I agree with Doug that it shouldn't be so, but Laura's right that academia is slow to catch up.

[laura]

This is one of those conversations that comes around the blogosphere every few years. Some context: here, here, and here.

I'm a big fan of the notion of academics as public scholars. Dan Drezner has written a lot about this topic.

[Doug]

Dan is actually one of the examples I was thinking of. He's very sharp, of course, and has some first-mover and path-dependency advantages because of when he started, but he's also someone who injects enough personality to make the blog worth reading. There are some self-conscious schticks (Selma Hayek and the ed insertions, for example), along with some personal interests beyond the ostensible subject matter of the blog (e.g., Red Sox). I don't think you can have a successful blog without that sense of the person behind the writing. Different people have different levels of comfort with what they put up on a blog (the other Doug Merrill, for example, blogs from a way, way different headspace than I ever would); they'll attract different audiences.

Laura, do you think this conversation is changing with subsequent iterations? 2005 was a long time ago in some senses, but only in some.

As for what's proper, I don't think there's a general answer. Krugman cites one of my co-bloggers; Edward is using our platform to do an end-run on the Spanish media because it's rather tightly controlled and important things can't be said. We're interested in the occasional policy impact and potential greater public awareness. A peer-reviewed journal article that's six months in the making and another 18 or so in the publishing pipeline is not something that we much care about. Which is another reason we're not academics.