Of spans and series, or why I haven't written in mrontemp that much

It is now March 10, 2009, and this is only the seventh post that I've written at mrontemp this month.

Compare this with January 2009, during which I wrote 59 posts in this blog, or almost two posts per day.

Or how about January 2008, when I wrote 202 posts?

One could reach the conclusion that I've quit writing in the long form and have instead reverted to just shooting the breeze on FriendFeed.

But actually, that's only part of the equation. I've been blogging up a storm - just not here.

I've talked about my Empoprises project before on this blog. For those who aren't aware, I author a series of four blogs under the "Empoprises" banner. Unlike the "all-encompassing" blog mrontemp, the Empoprises blogs are each devoted to a specific topic.

Far from restricting me creatively, the existence of four separate blogs has actually given me more freedom.

For example, I will often make a game of taking the same event and spanning it across as many Empoprises blogs as possible. Take my weekend visit to the Wal Mart in Chino, California - a business in the Inland Empire that sells music. Yeah, I milked that one.

But I'm having just as much fun writing various series of posts in the blogs. My longest-running series, Empoprise-NTN High Noon, takes a look at various restaurants and bars that offer NTN Buzztime trivia. And I'm getting close to wrapping up a series entitled When Madonna Was Hot. And I just wrapped up A Piece of the P.I.E. (Professionals of the Inland Empire).

But sometimes, rather than planning a series, I just fall into one. For example, on Monday I wrote a post entitled Payola, pay per post, or the 1984 commercial? An inconsistency of moral outrage re product placement business practices. Today, I followed it up with Or perhaps I am outrageous - an opposing view on disclosure and pay per post. Although this doesn't have a cutesy title, I hope to pursue the topic in the future.

If I hold up.

You see, I've been able to keep these blogs running by writing scheduled posts at odd hours (for example, unless I change the schedule, I've already written a Thursday post for Empoprise-BI, "Words aren't only cool, they make you money"). But time is finite, as Steven Hodson noted in a post entitled "Think long and hard before starting that second or third blog." An excerpt:

The problem is that time and energy are never kind to us – especially if our work on our main blog is our primary concern. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence as the web is littered with blogs that have been long forgotten for one reason or another. We only have so much time and/or energy and no matter our first rush of getting that new blog up and running at some point we run out of steam.

So perhaps this may falter along the way, and Empoprises may give me nightmares in the future. But at the moment I'm having fun.

P.S. Steven Hodson wrote his cautionary post on March 2. I've wanted to write a formal response to it, but it's taken me eight days to do it. Although this post is a non-scheduled post, one problem with writing scheduled posts is that they often aren't all that timely. But what does that matter to me? I am not trendy.

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