Blogging again

Blogging is true social media, always was, because bloggers linked to each other and shared each other’s content.

I’ve been blogging again – and reading other people’s blogs.

To be perfectly clear: I’m loving it. So many great people writing interesting things! I’m catching up with them all at my own speed with an RSS reader¹ as well as by subscribing to email newsletters.

While reading these marvellous blogs, I’ve been making notes about what they have to say, specifically about blogging. Some of those quotes are below, but I’ve missed a lot.

One that I’m keen to track down stated, in more or less these words, that blogging is true social media – always was – because bloggers linked to each other and shared each other’s content.

What came over us all, in the last however many years, that we came to believe we could only share our work on the closed platforms owned by mad billionaires?

Anyway.

Further down the page, you’ll see a handful of quotes from some of the bloggers I’ve been enjoying on my RSS reader. And here are five of my own most recent posts:

Quotes on blogging

"The thing about blogging is, you can just write about the things you love... A blogger can simply 1. love a thing, and 2. write about it. Sometimes this writing takes the form of, basically, an appreciative yawp—I feel like that’s me, more often than not—but other times, it’s the best, most penetrating aesthetic analysis you’ve ever read." — Robin Sloan

"A blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn't have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley." — Alan Jacobs

"I grew up in the back-rooms of print shops where my dad and his friends published radical newspapers, laying out editions with a razor-blade and rubber cement on a light table. Today, I spend hours slicing up ASCII with a cursor. I go through my old posts every day. I know that much – most? – of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain." — Cory Doctorow

"A random thought on Substack: When Medium started 10 years ago (!!!) it was surrounded by mystique and "status" (invite only, looked amazing, minimalist editor, et cetera). But, over time, that's evaporated and now — personally — I have a lot of trouble getting over my Medium Biases whenever I see a link to something on the platform. Namely, that the experience might be a bit clunky, that the content will be kinda anodyne, of a certain tone l'm not interested in. Obviously (??), Medium has tons of great writers using it, but l'm just relaying my subjective experience as a reader / how the aura of a platform can shift, and by dint of hitching yourself to that platform, perception of your work also shifts." — Craig Mod

"Blogging always suited my personal style of thinking and exploration: I like to ponder things, look at a topic from multiple angles, read other peoples thoughts on the topic (via their blogs and the RSS feeds that notified me of new posts), use the writing process to think the topic through and come to conclusions of my own, and finally read the comments and response posts from other bloggers. This all takes time, but that’s the point: you consider a topic carefully and write something thoughtful, yet opinionated, about it." — Richard MacManus

"Blogs connect three real desires : to hear our own voices, to be heard by others, and to hear what the crowd thinks." — Derek Sivers

"[Blogging is] a great way for me to share what I'm up to for folks who may be interested — but also, and for me primarily, to keep a kind of life journal." — Alan Jacobs

"Redesigning this website over the weekend gave me a curious feeling. It was a deeply cozy one, as if my work sits on a continuum of all the other websites and books every made. As if my work is a link in a long chain through time." — Robin Rendle

"I think of blogs like a green “available” light... I’m here, alive, and ready to chat!" — Matt Webb

"We're not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it. By maintaining our own spaces, linking to each other, creating the interconnected web of independent sites that the blogosphere once was and could be again." — Joan Westenberg

"The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention." — Cory Doctorow

"Writing to me is sort of like exercise. It’s very easy to say “ah, I don’t have time to do this” and give it up, and then discover that there is some sort of gap in your soul, a bit of a spiritual unease and languor that comes from lack of creation and reflection." — Justin Duke

"I don’t want all the hard work to disappear in a puff of smoke once I snuff it, so I’ve been thinking. Could this blog become a family heirloom?. Could I pass this site on to one (or both) of my sons and have them continue to write here?" — Kev Quirk

"I love putting stuff online. Since I was 16 (that’s 20 years ago), I’ve been doing so – on now-dead forums, now-dead social networks, and surprisingly still-alive blogs. Seeing the things I created online makes them better, I find." — Lisa Charlotte Muth

"The more I posted to my blog, the more regret I had about all those years giving Twitter power over my own content… Blogging at a personal domain name is a kind of investment in the future of the web. It’s a statement that you value your own writing and are ready to contribute to making the web better." — Manton Reece


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¹ RSS Reader. Use web feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place: like podcasts, but for reading.
Matt Webb wrote a handy short guide to RSS feeds.
The specific Reader I use is NetNewsWire, a free and open source RSS reader for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.