In May of last year, noticing how some bloggers I read often had slowed their publishing, or found alternative routes to express themselves, I asked if they were suffering from what I termed "Blog fatigue." With the dog days of summer upon us (in the Northern hemisphere), I'm seeing the issue crop up again, as peers are talking about taking time off from blogging or social media, explaining holes in their publishing schedule, or openly questioning their enthusiasm. And while I understand the occasional self-assessment, I believe many are feeling pressure to hit a certain number of posts in a given time period, or are feeling challenged to keep pace with much more visible, prolific, people for whom this is much more aligned with their career.

See:

• SheGeeks: The Repetition of The Blogosphere
  
• Colin Walker: Hiatus?
  
• New Comm Biz: Blogger burnout? Give up or dig in.

The truth is that unless you're being paid specifically to blog:

• You don't need to blog every day.
  
• You don't need to post more than once a day.
  
• You shouldn't feel guilty about "gaps".
  
• You don't have to explain yourself to anyone.

Unfortunately for many of us who participate in the tech blogging space, there are many examples of blogs or individuals who can crank out more than one post a day, every single day. There are examples of people who seemingly offer strong content with every article. And there are also the uber-connected, who are seemingly ever-present in a wide variety of social networks, always seem to get to things before you do, and are "ahead" in every statistic, be it number of contacts, comments, or posts. And this doesn't even begin to take into account the professional multi-author blogs, run like an assembly line.

The fact that these individuals are both visible and measurable can bring others to feel inadequate, or challenged to "keep up" when it's actually not necessary. It makes more sense to "be yourself" than to try and match up with somebody else who has different goals and set of circumstances.

I had lunch with a friend this afternoon who said he often won't post to his blog for upwards of a week if nothing strikes his fancy. For him, there's no inner push to meet a quota, to post every day, or provide a take on the last 24 hours' happenings. And I found his counsel wise - to not forget why you started blogging in the first place. For most of us, it wasn't to compete with the professional blogs or to get a scoop to a story, or to have the most followers on the favorite social network of the month. Instead, it was to communicate and share ideas, or just to act as a log of your thoughts and activity.

In the world of business, your revenue starts over at zero every fiscal quarter. If you just had a great quarter, well, good for you and get back to work, because you need to hit quota and make your number in 90 days, or you and the company might be in trouble. But in blogging, assuming you don't have a boss paying you for each entry, there is no quota to fill. If you don't post in three days, you're not going to be fired. Instead of adding stress to your life by setting artificial standards on what you need to do, and posting for the sake of posting, or not giving it your best effort, it makes more sense to let the content drive your effort, and not the other way around.

So don't stress out. The only person keeping score is you.

When it comes to driving, safety and rules, I can be an unfair, biased, elitist.

I feel that with 15 years of ticket-free, accident free, driving, I should be allowed to drive, without worry, 15-20 miles over the speed limit, while others more accident-prone should be branded as such and forced to follow speed limits to the mile. I believe that I should be allowed to drive with my laptop in my lap surfing high-speed wireless Web, while reading a book and eating a burger, while others shouldn't be allowed to remove their hands from the 10 and 2 position, thanks to my so-far spotless record. I don't think I should have to comply with California's latest attempt to pander to worrywarts, and it's clear many aren't.

While I understand it was the popular thing to try and "protect" our roads by forcing people in the state of California to go "hands free" and stop driving with their phones clutched to their ear, I've seen the new law has led to a new breed of evaders, whom I see every day holding their phones below the dashboard, presumably with speakerphone on, glancing about for law enforcement.

See Also: LiveDigitally: New California Headset Requirements Law is Political Baby-Kissing at its Finest

Prior to the law, which went into effect on July 1st, it was fairly common to see people on the phone to and from work, with receivers clutched to their ears, necks stretching to the side before lane changes, or talking idly as we all were stuck in stop and go traffic. And while I knew many people, including me, often, were on their cell phones, I wasn't any more worried about their driving than I was worried if I saw somebody eating, somebody bobbing their head to loud music, or if their car already had a significant share of body damage - a good indication they might get into an accident again.

Now, with a law in effect saying all phone use must be hands-free, it's clear not everybody made the switch to bluetooth, or turned off their phones. But instead of holding them to their ears in defiance of a knee-jerk law, I'm constantly seeing people driving with one hand, holding the phone, face up, just below the dashboard, and in theory out of the view of the cops. Surely, this isn't better than clutching the phone to your neck and looking straight ahead?

There are a million different ways to be distracted while on the road. Some choose to do their makeup, or fix their hair. Others choose to eat fast food. Some constantly surf radio stations to find the right beat, or can be seen putting in a new CD. Others still may smoke, one hand dangling outside the window, eventually discarding the butts in the gutter. And yet, with the exception of that last bit, none of these things are crimes.

Prior to the hands-free law going into effect, I would be checking e-mail at stopped intersections, or reloading sports scores on the Blackberry. I've even hopped on Google Maps, while driving, to find a nearby restaurant or market chain. I looked up e-mail contacts and forwarded messages that had to be out "right then". Now, if I want to pull off such electronic subterfuge, I'll have to be holding the Blackberry below the wheel, glancing upward every once and again to be sure my driving hasn't gone off course.

We were safer before.

Duncan Riley calls the new world of multi-locational blogging and aggregation Blogging 2.0. I call it being flexible and adjusting to how technology advances change how we communicate, collaborate and share, without being set in our ways. And like FriendFeed, Shyftr and other sites before it, Social Median, a new entrant to the social news space, is giving us yet another forum to add comments and discuss blog posts in a smaller social circle, away from the original source. And while Social Median doesn't commit the "cardinal sin" of copying over a full feed and enabling comments that got many in a ruckus over Shyftr last April, the site does provide a headline and an excerpt - good enough for us to get started.

Despite only being available in beta for less than a week, Social Median has been shoehorned into my online news consumption activity, lopped on to my staples of Google Reader and FriendFeed - and each site performs a different critical function.

Google Reader continues to be the lifeblood of my news consumption. It is where I get every single story from hundreds of feeds in rapid fire, and I get to share them to my shared link blog, and to FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is where I'm broadcasting all my online activity from multiple feeds, and engaging with peers about everything from Smugmug to YouTube to Last.fm.

But Social Median is focused. It is all about finding who is creating news, finding new news sources and discussing the topics of the day. Keeping my geek propeller hat on, I am signed up to follow topics like Apple, Blogging, Social Media Watch, Social Networking and Tech News. So far, I've found about 40 different "Newsmakers" in Social Median whom I trust to bring me the news through their submissions and clips.


A Recent Active ReadWriteWeb Story on Social Median
Keeping the topics focused and my peers as the sources makes a combination ready to talk tech. This means rather than passively hitting "share" in Google Reader in isolation, I can browse the 22 comments on ReadWriteWeb's story "Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage" on SocialMedian (see it here), while only 21 were on the original site. I can add to Social Median's 14 comments on Mashable's Checking Email in the Bathroom? You’re Far From Alone story, which got 18 comments on the original site. (See the Social Median copy) We're also talking about stories from TechCrunch, from ChrisBrogan.com, and even the New Yorker.


A Mashable Story On Social Median With Activity
Blogging 2.0 is about participating everywhere, and understanding that the comments can't be controlled just on your blog. They're moving to micro-communities where people are comfortable discussing your content with peers. In the last few months, we saw talented developers issue applications that let you embed FriendFeed conversations back into your blog (as I am running). Given SocialMedian's early success, it's possible we may see this happen again. I've seen a lot of interesting sites in the lifestreaming and social news space over the last few years, and Social Median is among the few I expect to be using every single day. If you're a blogger who wants to be part of the full conversation, and not just a partial view, make sure you're signed up to Social Median and monitoring or participating. You can find me here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray.

Over the last dozen years, I've amassed more than 36,000 stored e-mail messages in my Apple Mail. Through upgrades from Mac OS 8 to 9, OS X and all the ensuing system updates, and from Eudora to Microsoft Outlook Express, Entourage and eventually Apple Mail, I've managed to import all the items, losing almost nothing in the process. And I've been a happy .Mac customer (now MobileMe Mail) since almost the day it debuted. But now, I'm beginning to think I need to start making more frequent backups and deleting old messages, as my index is threatening to die.

Since the update to MobileMe Mail, at any point during the day, whether I am receiving new mail, or moving mail from the Inbox to hierarchical folders, I've sporadically gotten an error saying Apple Mail needs to "repair its information", then forcing me to quit. This has happened practically every day over the last week-plus.




When trying to reopen Mail, I get a note saying I need to reimport all my messages, which takes about 20 minutes, and then, all should be well.





So far, as much as I can tell, no messages have been lost. But some of the metadata is definitely awry, as old folders long left untouched show that messages sent several years ago are now marked as having gone out today, with the timestamp of when my index was rebuilt.

Over the years, I've rolled up a lot of messages, and my e-mail archive is a great resource for me to find old conversations with family members (going back to 1996), or searching keywords to find the first time something came to my attention. My e-mail folder with my father, for example, has more than 3,100 messages in it. My "Blog" top level folder has 3,600 messages, "Commerce" has 3,200, "Comments" another 3,000. There are about 2,500 in the folder for messages to and from Mom, and between 2,000 and 4,000 apiece for Twitter and FriendFeed.

There's no question that alerts from the social services I use have accelerated my e-mail glut, and I'm a pack rat when it comes to saving my mail. But now that I'm starting to see more failures on my Apple Mail, which has been rock solid for more than a decade, I'm starting to "think different" about saving everything. I just might backup again and then go on a deleting run. Hopefully, I can get this solved before it's too late and I lose anything significant.