My New Approach to Blogging

It has been almost a year since UBM TechWeb folded Intelligent Enterprise into InformationWeek, a larger-circulation, better-resourced publication.  Yet I’ve written only four 2011 articles for IWK, the last published May 12.  IWK’s sense of itself — audience, topics, voice — is different from IE’s, and I no longer have the freedom to post whatever I feel will appeal to the BI/analytics audience.  My work is now edited; I used to be able to post directly. Editing may lead to clearer writing, and being read by a larger audience is great, but the need to respond to an editor’s requests imposes a significant time burden.

It’s time to accept the new (to me) rules and get back into the game.  I know, finally, how to do that in a way that nonetheless allows me to continue to work on my own terms.  A free-standing blog is the answer, this blog.  I will post here and also make entries available for selective republication by IWK or, when they’re not an IWK fit, other platforms.

This initial blog entry is my way of closing the door, yet my first step will include one last look back, an explanation why I felt cast adrift by the demise of Intelligent Enterprise.

I’d long written for IE, also occasionally for IWK and a variety of other outlets. I mentioned above the benefits of writing for InformationWeek, also the loss of freedom.  That IWK showed little regard for old Intelligent Enterprise content didn’t help. The old intelligententerprise.com URLs stopped working, forcing me and other authors to update our publication lists and, far worse, rendering useless Web-published links to our work. IWK couldn’t be bothered to devote a few programmer-days to mapping the old URLs to new ones?  An insult, frankly.  IWK did migrate old content, however with no regard for layout.  Check out an example.

These complaints made, let’s move on.  I have a variety of topics to write on.  It’s time to get back to article writing.

P.S. I’ve started a second blog for a part-time gig of mine.  Check it out at sethgrimes.blogspot.com.

Leave a Reply