Originally meant as a comment on the post Back to the Blog by Dan Cohen.
Over the years (quite some years ago) I ran a handful of “back2blog” challenges, to try and get people writing on their blogs again. They worked, but once the challenge was over, we all folded back into Facebook.
I’ve been writing more on my blog these last six months or so. One thing that helped me was to try and go back to the early days of pre-social-media blogging, when I’d write much shorter pieces than the essay-like ones. I realised that one of the things that made me write things that could very well have been blog posts on facebook rather than on my blog was that I had come to see blog posts as “articles”, complete with a proper title, appropriate categories and tags, and to make it worse, as I’m bilingual, a short summary of what I was writing in my “other language”.
To do that, I started posting things as “asides” — a post type WordPress provides with for somewhat lesser content. I also decided that my 45-minute commute on the train was more than enough time to crank out a quick post, and when I’m not travelling with colleagues, I really make an effort to write stuff.
I really believe that unless Facebook et al backpedal in making their platforms less addictive (cf. Clay Shirky’s segment in this OTM episode) we are definitely going to see people falling back on their blogs.
Now let me go and find a no-nonsense-no-frills newsreader so I can subscribe to Dan’s blog.
Similar Posts:
- What We Write And Where We Write [en] (2013)
- Back to Blogging Challenge Wrap-Up [en] (2012)
- More Musings on My Blogging [en] (2009)
- Business Thoughts [en] (2008)
- My Categories are a Mess [en] (2006)
- Blog, What Happened to You? [en] (2010)
- Cheese Sandwich Blog [en] (2005)
- Measuring a Blog's Success: Visitors and Comments Don't Cut It [en] (2011)
- Blogging Tribe: A Social and Blogging Experiment Looking for Volunteers [en] (2013)
- The Big 2009 Category Revolution [en] (2009)
Also published on Medium.
For a newsreader, I’ve been happily using Tiny Tiny Rss since Google Reader’s disparition… Word of advice if you go this way: use it with a PostgreSQL database.
I’ve received news of this posts’ publication in “The Old Reader” (https://theoldreader.com/) which I prefer to Feedly.
hi Stephanie, just yesterday I thought of your back2blog challenges. In October I came to the same conclusion you do above, that I was posting things in FB that could be blogposts if I let go of my idea of a ‘proper’ posting which had over time become ‘an essay with all proper references linked and with a perfect image’. Those proper postings I usually never got around to. Last fall I sharply reduced my FB interaction (and at the start of this year removed myself altogether to gain some space for attention and writing). In the past 6 months I’ve blogged more than I have since 2006. Helped by rethinking what I find permissable to post, and by adding two content streams (part of the RSS but not of the front page of the site) for ‘day to day’ smallish informal things away from the main focus of my blog, and for ‘micro’ postings which are titleless tweetlike things.
And I’ve been rebuilding my rss feed collection, as most of the feeds I was subscribed to had died over time. I use Readkit for feedreading.