Lessons from 2007

Lately I have found a lot of Robert Scoble's blog posts to be somewhat off-key in various ways, but he just came out with a great 2007 year-end summary entitled "What I've learned in 2007." Actually, I think it may be his best post ever. It is rather long, but proves that length is not a factor since he structures it as a list of crisp, succinct numbered bullet points, which is precisely my kind of preferred style.

One of his lessons that made me stop and think was this one:

39. Big mistake? Not spending more time working on posts. The ones where I thought about the post for hours turned out great. The ones I banged out really fast without thinking too much? They are the stupid ones.

I am not sure I totally agree with it, but I at least half-agree with it. It is clearly true for this specific post of his which clearly embodies a lot of deep, reflective thinking. An example of the negative side of his point is his recent post entitled "Why isn't Scoble against 'thought crimes bill?'" which was clearly just a knee-jerk reaction and off-the-cuff response. I am sure he could have turned it into a great post with some real insight and social value with just a brief amount of reflection. OTOH, he might have been better advised to steer clear of political debates on a technology blog. Either way, a post that is "banged out really fast without thinking too much" is probably worse than no post at all, unless you happened to believe in the old adage that "No PR is bad PR", which I do. The beauty of blogs is that you can experiment and all will be forgiven.

I had half-hoped that one of the benefits of technologies such as Twitter and Facebook would be to be magnets for all the off-the-cuff casual comments and that stand-alone blogs would continue to be refined and turn into more of a true "craft" rather than endless cruft. Maybe next year. Hopefully Robert will focus on more of his good posts and fewer of his "bad" posts.

Now... I suppose I should be working on my own list of lessons from 2007. Sigh.

-- Jack Krupansky