A Return to Blogging
Blogging pioneer Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, turned 30 the other day which got me thinking (even more than I have been recently) about my own online writing journey. Like a lot of people, I started writing online with Blogger and Wordpress (when you had to run it off a thumb drive), but was soon swayed by the promise of social media.
If I’d stuck with my first blog, it’d now be older than my niece who just celebrated her 18th birthday.
At the time, though, creating online content felt ephemeral. The Internet was young enough that there was no sense of permanence about anything. I didn’t see any problem bouncing from platform to platform and having my own “writing year zero” every time.
Nearly two decades on, though, and I’m left with a massively fragmented online presence. This blog is a few years old and until I revived it recently was mostly just a collection of old Medium and LinkedIn posts.
I’ve got thousands of tweets and threads about product management on Twitter that, in hindsight, would’ve been better turned into articles on my own domain.
I’ve had TinyLetter, Substack and Beehiiv newsletters that I’ve launched and killed multiple times—then there’s all the other blogs and sites I’ve forgotten about that are still out there in the ether (or on the Internet Archive if you dig hard enough).
David Perell talks about writing online as the best form of networking, and he’s right:
But the ability of your content to compound only really works if you own it.
Like a lot of online creators, I sacrificed ownership and control for reach. It felt no different at the time to choosing to write for mainstream music publications instead of my own ‘zine, but the reality has been very different.
I recently read a great article about the importance of building your own castle on the Internet (which is where the meme at the start of this post came from).
While you might get more reach from using other platforms, that’s far outweighed by the advantages of having your own personal space online.
Blogging seems to be having a resurgence recently, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of content creators have been burned by Musk’s destruction of Twitter, or Substack’s unwillingness to ban Nazis from their platform.
More and more people are beginning to realise that letting other people own what you say and who ends up hearing it online is a mistake.
I’ve always been a blogger at heart; I’m just rediscovering what that means in 2024.
Turns out it’s not much different to what it meant when I started nearly 20 years ago—it’s just feels a shame that I drank the social media Kool Aid and lost sight of it.