Ideas of March is a great initiative from Chris Shiflett to resurrect the blog.
I agree with Chris when he attributes the demise of blogging to the rise of Twitter. Personally I know there are many things I tweet that would have been the basis of a blog post in the past. You’d be forgiven for thinking that by Twitter allowing us all to easily, and quickly gets things of our chest Twitter would work to separate the wheat from the chaff; leaving us with perhaps less frequent but higher quality blog posts. Instead Twitter just seems to have robbed many of us of impetus to publish.
In Elliott Jay Stock’s Ideas of March post he talks of not having posted for over three months, and here my blog has become little more than a repository for videos I like.
I’m hoping that Ideas of March combined with my new blog design (don’t ask) will give me the impetus to start writing proper blog posts again.
Chris proposes we write about what we like about blog posts – so what do I like?
Over the years I’ve been reading blogs it has changed as blogging, and blogs have changed. I’ve enjoyed learning from blog posts with subjects ranging from the Hipster PDA to the existence of Chap Hop. These days what I enjoy are blogs that are a closer to journals and show more of the writers personality, interests and opinions. I tend to stay away from the more ‘technical’ blog posts I once read.
Blogs and blogging happened at a key time for me. A time when my love of the web had been sorely tested by working for too many years in large Corporations that continued to not understand the web or only wanted to ‘monetize’ it – of how I hate that word but oh how I enjoy spelling the American way.
But I digress.
I’ve said before that the rise of the blog, and the first @Media conference in 2005 were the events that rekindled my love of the web. Blogging was to me a realisation of what the web had been envisioned as by it’s creators: a read/write environment. After years of read the ease of blogging, via services such as Blogger where I started my first blog, brought write to the majority of web users. Anybody with access to the web could share their thoughts and ideas with the whole world in a matter of moments. It is for this reason I love the blog, and it is for this reason that I hope that not only do we manage to stop the slow decline of the blog but perhaps spark a blogging renaissance.
Here’s to the Ideas of March.
I want to get back to writing and publishing, I thought about resurrecting my newsletter but it never gained any real traction, mostly due to my rather ad hoc publishing approach I suspect.
Last weekend I was about to post some photos from a frosty forest walk onto Instagram and paused as I was pondering the best tags to add to ‘drive engagement’.