Blogging – working or having fun?
What is our main focus on blogs: is it about our “work” (and how it works) or about us having “fun”?
Icerocket’s blog search engine (see graph) presents clear trends: on average 6% of our posts contain the phrase “work”, while about half (2.9%) contain the phrase “fun”. Are we really that much concentrated on the “work” and neglect the “fun”?
I have compared these frequencies to the data collected on frequencies of the English language (edict presents frequency word lists which reflect general non-academic English used in newspapers, magazines and books). There, it seems that these two words have a greater frequency difference. While “work” ’s frequency in language is 0.07%, the fun word frequency holds only 0.0043% – this is a 17 times difference in the English language (compared to the 2 times difference found in blogs).
We can conclude that while blogging we dedicate more attention to “work” than to “fun”, but we do write more about fun in blogs than mentioned in conservative newspapers, magazines and books. Might blogging be the ultimate solution for working with fun?
icerocket: “work”, “fun”
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April 28th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
That’s hardly fair. “work” also gives twice as many Google results as “fun”. I think this is due more to idiosyncrasies of the English language than anything else.
I go by the Mark Twain definition of work: Anything you have to do is work. Do you feel you HAVE to write a blog post every X days in order to keep your audience/build traffic/establish yourself etc? The it’s work. It may be interesting and fun work, but it’s work nonetheless.
May 10th, 2007 at 6:08 am
In this response you used the word work 6 times and fun only twice. Once again work turns out as the more popular word.
One thing is that many professionals have a blog writing about the work they love so much. That’s fun – and work. Other is that we have so many more words about fun, (such as entertainment, enjoy, break loose etc.) than we do about work.
May 16th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Work is a verb and a noun, whereas fun is just a noun. This alone would account for most of the discrepancy.
November 21st, 2011 at 12:58 am
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