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The Miami Herald Balancing Act Column: A Blogger's Workday Never Ends

Posted on: Wednesday, 10 May 2006, 12:07 CDT

By Cindy Krischer Goodman, The Miami Herald

May 10--Around 1 a.m., when his wife and children are asleep, Brett Ellis is bright-eyed in front of his computer screen, creating a buzz on his blog about the latest incentives for buyers of a local condo project.

Just after breakfast, Ellis, a real estate agent, gets back on his blog again, opining about declining home sales in Lee County.

"It has become a passion," admits Ellis, who started his blog, or online journal (blog.topagent.com), to market his business.

The most successful bloggers invest significant hours in their blogs, where people share thoughts and businesses reach customers. But bloggers like Ellis must also learn how to cope with work/life balance when they're posting around the clock.

Clearly, the blogosphere is booming. On the corporate side, hundreds of companies, executives and employees are blogging, and hundreds more blogs are likely in the works. Overall, there are more than 37 million blogs in the world, and the number has doubled every 5 1/2 months for the past year and a half, according to Technorati, a San Francisco blog search engine.

The draw is evident: You can reach thousands, even millions of people for an investment of a few cents. But while it saves money, it costs personal time.

Robert Scoble, coauthor of a book on blogs, calls them, "The most powerful tools to emerge so far in the communications revolution."

Scoble, who helps run Microsoft's Channel 9 website, began his blog in 2000 and now has more than 3.5 million readers. For him, the thrill of reaching powerful CEOs and creating contacts all over the world has become intoxicating, eroding all work/life boundaries.

"I spend almost every minute of the waking day thinking about my blog in some way," Scoble admits.

To keep his blog interesting, Scoble attends conferences, business lunches and dinners and parties where he can pick up news or information on the tech industry. He meets his blog readers when he travels. He has hooked his wife and son on blogging. "It's a weird world I'm in," says Scoble. "Not everyone wants to be in that world."

To be a good blogger -- which is the best way to secure a high ranking on a search engine like Google -- you need to read other blogs, link to them, put comments on them and name your postings in search-friendly ways. And you need to research what you write about. People who quit blogging cite time as the major reason.

I just started a blog and find it a challenge to update regularly. I remind myself that I need to keep it fresh, even on days when reporting this column is the priority. Often, like other bloggers, I blog on days off or at night when I find a spare minute.

Some employees who blog as part of their jobs set a routine, a specific time of the day or week when they make entries. Cathy Benko wakes up at 5 a.m. on Wednesdays and makes a blog entry from her kitchen table.

Benko, director of the Women's Initiative for the national accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, started her blog in May 2005 to reach out to the women in the firm. The blog operates behind a firewall so that only employees can read about Benko's guilt as a traveling mom or her take on flexible work.

Benko says the time demand of blogging is more than she anticipated, but it's worthwhile. When she travels to various offices, she has an instant bond with women -- and men -- who read her blog.

Benko sends out blog alerts to her circle of readers when she updates, a trick that allows her to write less often and retain an audience.

While some people blog for fun, doing so has allowed them to stand out in their fields. The catch: The prominence poses time challenges.

University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin pens numerous blogs. The most notable is discourse.net, a personal blog he updates several times a day. Froomkin says that through experience he has found an acceptable threshold for blogging. He attracts about 122,000 readers.

Just months ago, Froomkin lured a huge following when he began analyzing the federal government's memos justifying torture. The process took hours but gained him thousands of readers, he said. Now, he says, he chooses to let others do the in-depth analysis and has only about two-thirds as many readers.

"I'm much happier like this than that," Froomkin says. "After all, I'm a law professor at end of the day."

E-mail comments cgoodman @MiamiHerald.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Miami Herald

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Miami Herald

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