Your Words are Wasted

So many things one could say. Maybe I'll try to blog some of them. If I can overwhelm my irritation at my blogging software.

Why does paying App.net a bit over four dollars a month make me a member of an elitist "country club", while paying much more than that for my own domain and hosting and backups and uptime monitoring and rapid application of security patches and the talent needed to manage all that makes me a salt-of-the-earth man of the people? Seems like that's only true from a very specific perspective.

I've made too much money setting up other people's blog software to pretend I don't understand why Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr (and even HN, for that matter) are better. People don't want to be publishers. They don't even want to be writers. They want to share things online with their friends.

I see a lot of complaints in this essay about archiving - you can't find old content, you can't save old content. Archiving is overrated. And I say that as someone who loves archives and archivists. It is important to save things, but most writing is not intended for the ages. Quite the opposite: The fact that one can spout some crazy in-jokes to one's friends on Twitter, and in a week from now nobody will be able to find those words, is a feature. And the fact that, in truth, Twitter and Facebook are almost certainly quietly archiving all your drunken rants forever, such that twenty years from now your neighbors will be able to pull them right up and show them to their dinner guests for a laugh, is a terrifying bug.

Again, most people don't want to be librarians, publishers, journalists, historians, ethnologists, typesetters, designers, promoters, SEO experts, or proud users of a piece of software. And even those of us who do want some of these things enjoy taking a break once in a while. We just want to socialize.

I really don't get the all or nothing attitude of this article.

I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account. The blog gets my best content. But it's not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing social graph (social buttons notwithstanding).

G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff. It allows me to cheaply signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new readers/relationships. I don't care if I offend people on G+ because I'm there to attract the like minded. So I say what I think.

And facebook is just a socialisation wheel greaser for local friendships. Here I'm much more guarded. I use content posted by people as conversation starters for when I see them in real life. I might have to deal with these people - so I keep it light, fluffy and fun. I personally don't care if facebook deletes all that content. (I see it as a medium risk since facebook isn't a particularly diversified business)

I decided a while ago that I need to engage on all these platforms - because concentrating solely on a blog only increases your overall isolation to your local life - cause it takes an enormous amount of time - and even your closest local friends aren't likely to even read it.

It might mean that I'll never put enough time into the blog for it be a standalone success. But the odds of that ever happening were slim to nil anyway - even if it did get 100 percent of my time. And there would have been a very high chance that I would have been miserable because such dedication would have led to a high degree of isolation.

This is the right balance for me. I don't expect everyone to have the same view - but then I'm not claiming it's right for everyone.

I run blogs on the websites of two businesses I'm associated with. In both cases the intent is not to start a conversation, but to pull in traffic and visitors from Google. Comments are not enabled. I usually base the blog topics on keyword searches that we want to target, and craft posts around that - discussing the topic and tying the business to that topic.

For static websites, even eCommerce websites, it's a great and effective way to add fresh content and pages to a site, and push up its rankings.

I'm a fast writer - easily able to produce a 600 word post in 20 minutes - and I write prose that is easy to read. The strategy works - on a robot level (Google), and on a human level (customers), but it takes time and persistence. It may take 6 months for a series of posts to cause a category page to rank in the top 3 of Google - in some cases longer.

It's also a strategy that many competitors cannot duplicate, as most are unable to write regular, meaningful blog posts. It's one of those SEO tactics that requires actual, real work, which is why so few do it well.

Wordpress, with a custom theme that fits in seamlessly with the website, is the way to go.

I prefer a domain and my own server. But nobody will see what I write. The average user can't use G Reader. They can use twitter and facebook. Why hasn't this issue been solved? I want a network with friends who are users that gives me control. Contradiction in terms?

Your words are most likely wasted on a blog too. If the choices are social network or blog, we're kind of screwed. I used to read paper magazine articles because they were interesting to read. I bought a magazine and read it like a book, like a collection of stories. There is almost nothing that comes close to that experience online. Some forums, maybe, but that's it. Nowadays you have to scan through several hundred items to find one interesting article to read, and even that will be short, time-sensitive and optimized for skimming rather than reading.

I could not agree more with Scott. I still have the hardest time trying to convince people to start a blog. "I don't have time to blog" "I don't know what I'd write about".. yet they end up posting lots of content casually on various social networks/forums.

Perhaps blogging tools need to adapt to more short form uses and have posting interfaces that seem more accommodating rather than a massive empty textarea with tons of options from slug to categories and tags.

The WordPress Prologue/P2 themes comes to mind.

Since the discussion is fragmented between the blog comments and here, I'm posting my comment on his blog here too.

I recently started blogging and my first blog post about why I blog has exactly the same reasons - control over content and flexibility.

I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now I'm starting to get discouraged - it's not that I don't like the blog it just that it got zero traction outside my circle of techie friends. I launched a small Trello app at the same time and even though both got zero marketing the app is about 3 times more popular by views and tens of times more popular by users (granted it is still only hundreds of views and tens of users).

What has discouraged me the most is that even when I put myself out there and posted something relevant and interesting (IMHO) on Hacker News I got exactly 1 vote and no comments. It's not even that it is bad, it's ignored.

I know that a month is not something substantial and if I continue to create interesting content people will eventually come (with some marketing). I just want to have a counter-point that a blog is not just writing text on your on domain - you have to market it and even than people might not care, just like any other product.

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But all the _people_ are in those "walled gardens," and if you're not trying to create a permanent archive of your words for the ages, it makes more sense to chose the platform that makes it easier to interact with an audience, rather than one that preserves everything you write forever.

It's intriguing hear Scott echo RMS. Although Scott limits his argument to the consequences of relying on corporations for services, a similar argument can be made regarding the behavior of governments (domain name seizures, for example).

I'd be interested in hearing where/how he draws the line.

One obstacle, in my eyes, is that some of the best blogging software out there is provided in a Software-as-a-Service model. This is, of course, less of a headache for the original developers—they have a guaranteed long-term income (rather than one-off license fees), and they don’t have to worry about portability or varying server specs. The result is that now, if a person wants to run his/her own blog and have total control over the content, s/he will need to write the software for it. I personally wouldn’t mind paying several hundred dollars for a piece of really good blogging software.

N.B.: I looked into Wordpress et al., but I always avoid using software written in PHP if I can, and theming in Wordpress involves more time than I have to spare.

"Own your space on the Web, and pay for it."

"You want control? Buy a domain and blog there. "

And at the very least if you don't want to pay or setup your own hosting site (and want to go the free route) at least register your own domain and have it pointed by cname or web forwarding to any of the free hosting providers out there. (Making sure to keep a backup of course).

Of course since true web hosting can be had very cheaply today (this isn't 1996) there really isn't any reason to just not setup your own site. If you are going to take the time to write something you can spend .50 per day (or less) on web hosting. What's your time worth?

in addition to that, all the big players KNOW that, like google, facebook etc. we wrote a paper about nosql-thingies... they're developed EXACTLY for this usage scenario - just store temporary non-over-the-ages-important data on some cheap maschines... if the data is lost, okay, the data is lost - shit on acid, shit on persistency, shit on consistency, but all the "un-interesting data" should be served fast -- this was the DoB of nosql.

can YOU imagine, that any big newspaper or library will store the (maybe) really important things on this systems - or ANYTHING else outside the blog-sharosphere? (sharophere should get the right buzzword for this activism) no... not really...

imho and like "mechanical_fish" mentioned, all people think, that their data, blog-entries, pictures or even JOKES are so important (funny/cool/needed), that should be shared all over the world... i'm not an anti-share-man in contrast to that, i REALLY use twitter, facebook etc., but the "hype" on blogging is too much for me.

let me clarify this a little bit and maybe from a technical point of view: in the last years, since ANYBODY thinks, that their mini-uncomplicated solution for $this problem in $that language that this should be shared, because it's "really important", the web is full of trash and blog-entries, where the question is searched an answer to, is just rewritten, WITHOUT an answer. any of you should now the problem, that you REALLY have to investigate now, to get a solution for a more complex problem or EVEN an academic paper/research-website... the web is full of junk and i'm not feeling lucky about that.

what do you mean?

Isn't it ironic that we discuss the article here and not on Scott's blog?

argument saying that your post might dissapear is wrong. how long will you host your blog when you're not feeling like writing blogposts anymore?

I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely:

http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services...

What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn’t one of the points of the semantic web to make decentralized information meaningful, retrievable and mixable?

So instead of having our own websites aggregate our own data from other people’s websites, we’ll let other people use the data from our own websites. Photos, meaningfully tagged, can be pulled in by Flickr via our own personal API, if you will. We provide the structured data, Flickr provides the functionality. The sharing. The social. Why not?

Personal publishing platforms like WordPress, Drupal, [your favorite here] could be extended to make use of microformatting, RDF, etc. and provide tools for syndication, as we now do with simple blogposts. Services don’t need to host our data. They only need to do cool things with it.

Blogging is dead.

I ran a fairly successful blog (front paged here a number of times). I recently cut the cord and abandoned it. The blogging tail is getting shorter and shorter as more and more people move to the closed and walled gardens.

I shut it down because it was the illusion of accomplishment: every time I got a hit entry I would assure myself that I've moved forward in some way, achieved something, etc. Whenever I thought about doing something actually beneficial, the easiest procrastination was to just go do a blog post instead, imagining that every hit actually meant something. That I was somehow accumulating assets in something worthwhile.

It achieves nothing, at least if you're already established. If you're new to the industry and unproven then it's a good way of trying to fake it before you make it, but if you're professionally grounded, it's a liability as much as a benefit.

Worse there is a tendency for readership to start to control what you write about, which is one reason I moved to more free-form content on a walled garden: I'll write about a caterpillar in the yard, my new lawn tractor, and some new development in Android, all because I no longer fool myself into thinking the blog is a business. It's just some random thoughts, whether read or not.

The time spent writing it -- even if you're pretty successful at it -- would almost always be better spent on other endeavours. To bring up some examples oft cited on here, John Gruber is one of the most successful bloggers, as is Marco Arment. They're reduced to trying to pitch t-shirts and affiliate links. Neither of them -- despite volumes of words spilled onto epaper -- change anything in the industry through their respective blogs. A lot of words evaporating into the ether, the converted incited into a chorus of the echo chamber.