The Voice of Your Writing

One of the things I find most interesting about blogging is the concept of "voice". I'm often told by readers that my blog has an interesting voice which always I find so curious -- because it's not something that I consciously do (OK, now I'm really thinking about it as I write!)

This is all the most interesting because you may have noticed that I haven't blogged in over a month. This is because I lost my "voice", both figuratively and literally. It started at Forrester's Consumer Forum in late October -- in the middle of the conference I came down with horrendous cold, despite countless tablets of Airborne. And rather than call-in sick and put up my feet after the conference, I plowed ahead through a very busy schedule the next week. The result: the cold got even worse and I literally lost my voice. It's taken a month for me to recover but I'm happy to report that after a round of anti-biotics and some really wicked codeine-laced cough medicine, I'm pretty  much recovered.

Well, that takes care of the literal voice loss. But something else also happened this past month -- I lost my internal blogging voice as well. Sapped of energy and health, I could just barely get my work done and care for my family. But that's only part of the story -- I have a dozen half-written blog posts in draft stage, all waiting to see the light of day. I realized this past week that I'm suffering from analysis paralysis -- I've been holding myself to a level of analysis and writing that is simply unreasonable given what I want this blog to be. My last substantial post was on the YouTube acquisition by Google, which was quite the event. But those kind of blog post opportunities come roughly about once a year, and for some reason, I've been trying to write similar posts for the past month with no success.

So I've vowed to follow Nike's mantra and "just do it", or in this case, to "just blog it". Damn the idea of quality and depth of analysis -- I'm better off getting something out there and getting your reactions to it. So here I am, writing a stream of consciousness and finding my voice again.