I have been writing blog posts every single day for one hundred and fourty five days and rather than feel more inspired, and get a big audience, I am writing for an audience of one. Some days I am filled with inspiration and I write the blog post in twenty minutes or less. Other days it takes me an hour or two. It’s hard to write every day because some days are interesting, so there is something to talk about, and other days are dull.
I have written at least one hundred and one blog posts in one hundred and one days. During this time most blogs have gone by unread. Blogging could be seen as futile but it isn’t. Having the discipline to write every single day, despite having no inspiration is good. It forces us to stop, think, and develop inexistent ideas.
In different times I would not write one hundred and one blog posts about nothing but we’re in a pandemic that is being ignored by the people with the power to get us out of it. This means fewer conferences, fewer meetings with people to do sports activities and more. It means less freedom to find covid safe work. It means living with the constant risk of getting long COVID. Switzerland is living in denial about the pandemic and this is frustrating.
During yesterday’s walk I found that I could read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen as an audiobook so I listened to a few minutes. It took me back in time to 2006 when people worried about the detrimental effect that bloggers that were not accountable would have on information, disinformation, reliability and accountability. At the time people worried that bloggers and certain social networks would spread inaccurate information and manipulate people.
Blogging one hundred and fifty-two days in a row is an interesting challenge. It encourages you to think of something daily, for months in a row. It also forces you to have the discipline to sit and attempt to write for one or two hours a day, whether inspiration is there or not. Often it isn’t. Add to this that most blog posts get zero views and you have a reason to stop and give up.
Blogging and Digital Minimalism are related. Blogging is about finding a topic and focusing on it for an extended period of time. Social media has shifted from being a conversation between individuals to one where personalities broadcast, and their audience is ignored.
When I saw an article, read a book, or had a thought I would tweet or write one or two sentences and post it to Facebook or Google Plus. When social media was about private conversations between individuals, and when no one was making profits of billions from our habits it made sense. Today using social media is about wasting our time, while others benefit, without benefiting ourselves.
With the sentence “Of Twitter threads (Mice) and Blog Posts (Humans)” you’ll see that I’ve done two things. The first is that I’ve modernised a well-known book title to draw parallels with the practices of writing Twitter threads and blog posts.
People write twitter threads because they think that it’s fast, convenient, will draw an audience and it’s trendy. It keeps people within the same site. No browsing between platforms and websites. There is the notion that people do not want to leave the social networks where they find themselves. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are portals, except that once you’re inside your trapped.
Instagram has become user-generated content with adverts every fifth post. We went from following friends and their life to following personalities within our field of passions. I follow climbers, photographers, and friends. By following strangers, the timeline has become less relevant. This is especially true about following influencers.
Influencers don’t share their life. They share adverts. They share an illusion, a dream, an ideal. In so doing their posts lose value because they are no different from adverts. They are cold and devoid of character. They are impersonal. They’re a waste of time.
Twitter threads and blogging are both free but whereas with one you need to click to read the continuation and it’s hard to print the other is self contained and easily shareable.
I see twitter threads, that as twitter threads are a waste of time on a conversational channel but would be ideal for a blog post. Imagine that you combine two or three tweets. That length would justify a blog post.
This morning I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter because most of the tweets I saw were people complaining about things or posts that would fit perfectly as blog posts on a website. We have moved towards the Social Media reflex, rather than towards an open sharing habit.
Before social media, we would have conversations on web forums and within comments on websites. As social media centralised all of those conversations so the engagement between people declined. With that decline of conversations so we shift towards two things. The first of these is complaining, rather than engaging. When you complain there is no expectation of a response so the personal investment is low. Add to this that algorithms are designed to promote posts that have a lot of engagement and you have a perfect storm of pessimism.
As serendipity would have it I have been a wordpress blogger for at least 11 years. As I was looking through notifications on worpdress.com I came across the notification below yesterday. As I searched for ideas for blog posts for today I came across an e-mail. [caption id=“attachment_3709” align=“aligncenter” width=“169”]
10 years of Wordpress[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_3710” align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”]
11 years of Wordpress[/caption] On this day, eleven years ago I set up this blog. Since then I have written about one thousand two hundred posts, tens of thousands of tweets and many many facebook messages. I mention this because blogging and social media are two different challenges. With blogging you spend the day thinking about a topic. You’re searching for something that you can write about for 300 or more words. Compared to nanowrimo where you try to have an average of 1666 words per day this is easy, until you add the public dimension. Writing for the world wide web is different to writing for yourself, with the knowledge that you will go back and edit it, eventually, if ever. Writing for twitter and facebook is easy. Twitter is a conversation so the more you socialise with other people the more dynamic your posting can be. The same is true of facebook except that facebook is a “silo” of people you vet and trust. Twitter is in essence a chatroom. A blog post is more time consuming. I like to write about technology and about the adventures I have. That’s when inspiration is easier. Imagine for an instant that Wordpress.com was more popular than Facebook or twitter. Imagine for a moment that people decided that instead of spending a few seconds per update they spent half an hour to an hour per post. Imagine that people read long form posts rather than short updates. Imagine that we go back to a blogging social media landscape where people write reflective posts. Imagine that we read rather than skim. The beauty of the long form, of writing blog posts is that we create content that people search for and read. Emotion is involved, but so is thought. Through blogging we generate an income for our content. More people should blog, and more people should share their posts.