Blogging and Voice and the Good vs the Perfect

I want to write about our posts last month, and the dueling philosophies behind our contributions.

{Begin Smack Talk}

I totally won Septembers awesomeness duel which comes as no surprise; Patrick’s writing strategy seems to be locking up a hundred monkeys with a typewriter and thirty pounds of meth and afterward transcribing the resulting the smears of red tinged brown off the shit stained walls.

{/Smack talk}

{Begin Sincerity}

On our most recent podcast, Patrick and I argued about who ‘won’ September’s awesomeness duel. Our challenge was for each of us to publish as many high quality blog posts as possible (limit one per day) to get our site back up to the standard it was on before July’s WordPressocalypse.  But when we got to discussing the results, our debate made me think and reconsider; which led to my posting regularity to taper off as I worked out what I actually thought.

Patrick’s argument boils down to this: while he didn’t approach posting at anything resembling my consistency, he put more care and thought into each of his posts.  This brings up interesting questions about our site’s voice and purpose.  Centrally, we have to ask, what do our readers actually visit the site for?  There isn’t a pat answer, and the conversation that we weave around this will drive how JohnvsPatrick evolves.

But what I’m thinking about is the meaning of the Voltaire paraphrase, ‘Never let the Perfect be the enemy of the good.’

Let me unpack what the saying means to me, ‘Don’t let the hypothetical, unattainable perfect get in the way of the completed good.’  Not to insinuate that either of us is anything approaching perfect, but even so we’re still trying to navigate our own personal ‘good/perfect’ spectrums.

Ideally, every post should be about an interesting subject or shareable core supplemented by interesting commentary.  For Patrick, if this criteria isn’t met the post doesn’t ‘count.’ For me, a post only has to be an interesting thing to share.  If I don’t have (or don’t have time to create) interesting commentary that in no way precludes me from sharing the kernel, the core.

I think another way that Patrick and I differ in how we approached this month’s duel is that Patrick has a better idea of what he wants from the site/what it is for; whereas I’m still experimenting.  I firmly believe in the ‘Fail early, fail often, fail better’ model.  Which (Patrick’s inevitable quips aside) is to in no way suggest that my posts are failures. Rather, that I didn’t put in the care and labor to try and ‘failure proof’ my posts that Patrick did (even though I probably put in more care and labor total).

As a writer and blogger, I’ve most definitely put out work ‘before it was ready.’  I’ve been -at times- embarrassed by things attached to my name.  But this is how I learn, and I suspect this is true for nearly everyone.

In my interview with Jim Munroe, he uses a phrase ‘growing up in public.’  That’s very much what I’m doing with JvP and -to a lesser degree- my life.  The reason I blog is because I want to be part of the conversation about geeky things but I don’t know exactly how to best go about that.  I don’t yet know what my half of this site’s voice is, but I’m willing to experiment and risk fail and learn. My suspicion is that is that quicker, more regular posts will generate more conversation overall (comments, correspondence, sharand so forth) but I’m willing to try different approaches to find out.

With all that said, the John and Patrick original working relationship consisted of me being a writer and Patrick being an editor.  Likewise, I’m the one who pitched Patrick on JvP but he’s the one who will highlight ways we can make it better.  I don’t know if he’s right about which style of posting is ‘better’ but I’m willing to see if his critique can improve my output.

{/Sincerity}

{Begin Smack Talk}

So in conclusion, Patrick is a lazy ass old man who barely posts and then tries to claim a win where there is no win to be found.  I will be proving this tomorrow with math.

Patrick, I believe your ship has come in.