What Happens to a Blog Post Deferred?

Answer: Other bloggers beat you to it, usually.

Are you like me? I always come up with all sorts of things when I’m in the shower. Maybe an awesome blog post idea, a link I’d want to Tweet, a fascinating Media Monitoring Minute for FIR, or a brilliant new strategy to pitch to the boss.

Unfortunately, unless I were to make creative use of a pumice stone, there is nowhere to write down all these flashes of brilliance while actually in the shower, and they mostly end up heading right down the drain with the soap suds, to be forgotten by the time I get around to picking out shoes (maybe it’s my over-abundance of shoes that’s causing this problem?).

I also always end up mulling ideas while in the car, yet never when it’s convenient to write them down, like while rotting in traffic (one thing about New Hampshire–here, "rush hour" means "three other cars on the road besides you, instead of the usual open road and occasional horseback rider"). This is especially true of blog posts. I’ll be struck with a great idea at the most inconvenient of times, and by the time I manage to fire up the old Live Writer…poof! Idea is gone.

And where does it go? Apparently, directly into the minds of other bloggers. Take my boss and excellent co-blogger, Jen White. (What, you didn’t think I’d come up with my own example, did you? For that I’d have to remember my ideas!)

Earlier this afternoon she started talking about these spiders that have created this enormous, acre-large web out in Texas. She heard about the story on NPR last month. On the surface, she wasn’t sure if this was a blog post, but thought it had a "Web (snerk) 2.0" angle in there somewhere. Yet, she’d abandoned the idea. I encouraged her to re-examine, and write it anyway.

No sooner do I sit back down at my desk and open up Twitter than Todd Defren Tweets a link to a Social TNT post about the very topic. (Great post too, check it out!) Quite a coincidence, considering the randomness of the subject matter!

This isn’t to say Jen can’t still write her own post about the spiders, but some of the magic fizzles when you see someone has beaten you to it, doesn’t it? The lesson here, I think, is to try (even if it means maybe getting out of the shower for a second to jot something down) to let your ideas grow into something, or be faced with the disappointment when someone gets there first!

Technorati: Web 2.0, spiders, Todd Defren, FIR