The Internet Is a Constant Experiment

I'm afraid I have to give up on the "Morning Coffee" feature. It's just not fitting the way I work. What happens is that a) I think to myself that it doesn't need to be posted until the next morning, which for me is way far away in the future, so far distant it's not worth planning toward. Then b) I forget about it until late at night when I start to get tired, am thinking about going to bed, and am reviewing in my head all the things I needed to get done that day and whether I've gotten them all done. At that point it occurs to me that I haven't written the post for the next morning. So then, c) fading and ready for sleep, I have to come up with something on the spot. Which is why that feature has been so rocky and variable in quality.

A person of ordinary organizational skills and a modicum of foresight would have no trouble writing the next day's morning post, say, each previous morning, but then, if I were a person of organizational skills and foresight, I would be going to work at an office every day, and have benefits, and be drawing a paycheck, and none of us would be here anyway. So, can't have everything; we are who we are.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. The Internet is the ultimate throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall medium; you just try everything and go with what works. TOP's scrap heap of stuff that didn't work is ten times as high as the pile of stuff that did.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "I liked a number of the coffee posts, but I got the sense it wasn't really your style. I prefer your old write-when-inspiration-strikes approach. But the coffee thing was there to alleviate the ghost town blog feeling during the whole moving process, and it did help. So here's to inspiration, and spaghetti."

Catherine: "Why not try 'Afternoon Tea?'"

saagar: "Mike, that's a very liberating idea—that the size of the scrap heap doesn't matter. Brilliant! I'll consider that idea an even trade for the loss of Morning Coffee—thanks."

Mike R: "Odd timing. Just this morning, I had been thinking, Morning Coffee is just not his style. Why don't I write him to suggest he give it up? Voila! You have done it. I look forward to your excellent longer format work."

Comments

[Niko X.]

Is this your post of the day? Or your last morning coffee post?

[k4kafka]

Have you considered re-thinking your work ethic...or hiring an assistant to help you schedule (structure) your daily chores ?

[Bernd Reinhardt]

I would strongly recommend that you keep auto posting whatever you write in the morning. I am a loyal follower, so I keep checking even if there isn't anything new up on the blog. But I will say that the consistency of having a new post to read with my "morning coffee" is really nice and I am sure that it is good for the blog. It doesn't matter when you write it, but posting on a regular schedule seems good for business.

[Michael Perini]

Sorry to hear that, but I guess I understand. You can only do what you can do.
I Did actually look forward to it. The "It's there first thing in the morning" factor was really refreshing .
But it was never a substitute for your 'real posts' which I've missed even more.
So if eliminating 'morning coffee' gets us more regular and nutricious lunch , I'm for it.
In the long run, you can only do what you're comfortable doing.

Everyone moves, and everyone deserves a vacation so you shouldn't fret too much about temporary disruptions.
We all look forward to a bigger and better TOP from the New TOP World HQ.

[adamct]

Twenty times.

;-)

(But we love you for it.)

[James Weekes]

I have two blogs, one for our trips to Provence and one for everything else. I really, really try to post every day and fail miserably. I'm much more likely to post 10-15 items in a day and then spend a week reorganizing for the next spurt. You have my full sympathies. I could not approach doing a blog like yours.

Morning Coffee was nice but not essential to this portion of your readership. Get the house settled, the printer going, the dogs trained,the stereo set up, the next print sale ready, the coffee roasted, the lawn mowed and then let us in on some of it. You are more organized than you think.

[Steve G]

Mike:

Too bad. - I'll miss 'Morning Coffee'. What I'd suggest (and relish) would be if you kept it as an irregular thing, perhaps an 'Afternoon Cup
of Tea' or 'Evening by the Fire' as appropriate, for bits or thoughts that don't quite rise to being 'Open Mike' material.

Steve

[Rob]

Don't worry, be happy.

[Chris Rusbridge]

Shame, I quite enjoyed its quirkiness. But it was introduced as a stopgap while you were worrying about the move, so you just have to stop worrying about that now and write some "normal" articles!

[darr]

You should write down the topics you tell readers you are going to write about, because you do not seem to return to a lot of them. Just a little 3x5" index card file with topics that you can visit for motivation or ideas or whatever writers call it. It could help with organization and planning. My 2 cents whether you want it or not.

[Tony Roberts]

I'm with you on this. I'd rather have you writing when you want to. Quality goes way up!

[Rod Graham]

How about something similar to Michael Reichmann's new "Phlog" site? You could post shots that you've made with a short description/discussion of them five times a week. They could be written ahead of time so no daily pressure to produce :-). We'd all like to see more of your actual handiwork with a camera!

[Michael Roche]

Mike as we say in my part of the globe "it was good while it lasted"so no regrets lets move on to the next experiment.

[Wayne]

I own a GX7. It stands as proof of my mental illness when it comes to cameras. It is all the camera that I have ever needed And yet, having acquired it, I continue to buy other cameras.

[Bahi]

I always enjoy you being you and this is a great example.

[Bob Smith]

NO MORE "MORNING COFFEE"!!!!!!

I want my MONEY BACK....oh wait, never mind.

Seriously just do what you feel like doing. I've never been disappointed with anything I've read on TOP.

[Jan Luursema]

That's too bad, I enjoyed these posts. If not for the timing (I check my RSS-reader irregularly) but for the format. The posts were usually not too long and on the lighter side subject-wise, often on current topics. I prefer these posts to the longer more heady posts.

[YS]

Reminds me of a quote by Eric Schmidt:

"The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had."

[Michael Bearman]

Quite so, Mike. How about a morning coffee post every now and again - but when you feel like writing a morning coffee post - and not otherwise? Otherwise, what is the point of self-employment?

[woof woof]

You should post when you have something to post, even a joke or an uncommented on picture will do :o)

But if you have nothing to say and nothing to post I wouldn't worry about it and I certainly wouldn't want you to force anything just to post something.

Even the best of friends sometimes have nothing to say and the lack of a post will soon be remedied, I'm sure.

[Kevin Purcell]

You could still do Morning Coffee is you "pipelined" your posts.

Always have one in the pipe waiting to go then you need to write one sometime during the day to replace that one. If you have a good idea write that one up. You can even reorder the ideas in the pipe if you come up with one that needs to go out promptly.

This is a common technique with cartoon writers on the Funnies page: they often tend to generate the cartoons in bursts and drip them out in the paper.

Trying to write a blog in a "just in time" fashion seems to have too little slack to deal with your best working practices or just having "one of those days".

[david adam edelstein]

I'm going to disagree with saagar: the size of the scrap heap does matter. If it isn't at least ten times as high as the stuff that did work, you are playing it waaaaay too safe.

[MHMG]

If you had a staff helping you to serve up the "latest and greatest" each and every day, and we were paying sufficiently to this website to expect that, then you'd have a reasonable formula for the "Morning coffee". Until then, it's a great concept without the financial backing to continue. I suspect that all web sites trying to serve up-to-date information on specialized topics face this problem.

[Robert Prendergast]

I have been thinking that the posts were becoming less about photography and its associations to covering more personal topics.

[Steve P.]

No reason you can't dust it off once in a while, should the mood overtake you. No need to take it out back and "make it hard to catch!"

[David Wilson]

I've enjoyed the morning coffee posts and will miss them. Their timing was just right for me in the UK. However, it beats me how you managed to publish anything at all while handling your house move alongside everything else.

[Mattias]

The Morning Coffee feature format, not that the features were not good, felt too much like other Internet-y sound bites. There's so much of short superficial posts on the web existing only to draw traffic. I very much prefer your long form writing where your print publishing background shines through and you have enough space to both shape interesting stories and arguments and to let your thoughts wander.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I personally liked finding content here a bit more regularly. If that way of doing it doesn't work for you (which it clearly didn't; it was somewhat apparent in the posts, too), I would urge you to look for another way to achieve somewhat more regularity.

In addition to being my personal preference, I have the impression from numerous sources that it's one of the main factors that helps build blog loyalty. Having a reasonable shot at finding something new the first time I go to TOP in a day is a good thing.

Related to all that, moderating comments a little faster (and, again, more regularly) would be a significant benefit in the same way (more chance of finding something new when I and others go to TOP in an idle moment). I think you could find helpers to handle the 80+ percent (that's a WAG) of obvious cases, and quite likely train them up so that some of them could take on the hard cases eventually.

(I do feel that the somewhat slow pace of discussion here is in several ways a benefit. People are a bit less likely to pop off unthinkingly since they know it won't appear instantly anyway, and the volume is kept down somewhat; in addition to being direct benefits those also allow people without time for or just uncomfortable in faster-moving discussions to participate here, and I'm sure many of them are valuable voices heard too seldom elsewhere. I'm a bit of an impatient loud-mouth myself, for me personally I'd push even harder for faster moderation turnaround, but that's not you, that's not TOP, and I see clear benefits *to me* in the way TOP is; though I'm arguing fairly gently for a bit more regular moderation and posting.)

[Chad Thompson]

I think I can code for you a custom Michael C. Johnston post generator. It'll scrape both your Blogger and Typepad site for the most popular content and post a newly organized thoughts on your behalf at 6:00 AM CST. Of course I'll have to run it through the Hemingway App first... http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

It'll be just like setting your camera to P or the green rectangle.

[Calvin Palmer]

I for one am glad that the Morning Coffee feature does not fit into your schedule and is being dropped. To me, it was like an intelligent version of Facebook and was one of the reasons why my daily visits to TOP stopped. I hope you go back to the original winning formula and your tribute to Ray K Metzer suggests that you are back on track.

[Minnow]

Here's to experimentation! But if you want run regular features, why not do a weekly dissection of a photo? It's something you do well but not all that often. Just stick a photo up and say why you think it matters.