In this return episode, I reflect on a year spent stepping back from big social platforms, talk about the transformative habit of posting to my own website first and argue that everyone should have a blog.
Listen to the episode:
Read the transcript, with links:
Hello. This is An Adequate Podcast with me, John-Paul Flintoff. It’s adequate because adequate is good enough — and good enough is good enough. I can’t do perfect.
It’s good to be back. It’s been about a year (!) since the last episode, so thanks for popping in. I can tell you’re listening, because otherwise you wouldn’t know that I said that.
Lately, one of the things I’ve been doing a lot is moving off the big social media platforms – not quitting them entirely but doing less on them – and going right back to first principles: putting things on my own website first.
There’s a name for this. I think the acronym is POSSE: it stands for Post on your own site and syndicate everywhere. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
I’ve been posting a lot more to my own website, knowing of course that most people aren’t going to visit it directly, and that’s okay. It creates lots of material for, say, my newsletter.
What I’ve really noticed actually is a huge mindset shift: a sense of ownership and the capacity to build up a large bank of my own material, which I can then reuse and, as the acronym has it, syndicate elsewhere later. I don’t think I would have built that habit if I had posted first on social media and then put it on my website. It seems to be a very important part of this that I did actually put it on my website first.
Recently, to build the habit, I’ve been posting on the website every day for 30 days on a project that I call Outstagram.
It’s essentially my version of Instagram, but off Instagram. I post a picture with a little story – the kind of thing I would previously have posted directly to that platform, but without doing it there. I used to post those things without thinking that they might be valuable to me later and that perhaps I could have them on my website. So now I’m rectifying that and posting them for myself first. I may later post them on Instagram.
Why am I doing this? Well, partly because, like pretty well everyone I can imagine, I’m getting less and less comfortable with these platforms owned by mad billionaires. I thought I’d try doing my own thing first. So that 30 days of practice, I’ve done throughout January, and actually some of December, too.
I expect I’ll share more on this podcast about how that worked and what I’m doing next. I hope maybe you will try – a whole month of posting every day to your own blog!1 Do you have a blog? Do you call it a blog? Nowadays, many people call blogs “Substack,” which seems to be a strange mistake, because Substack is just one enterprise of many that allow you to build a platform and send out emails2.
So I’m going back to the word “blog.”
If you don’t have a blog, maybe you might like to get one. Or perhaps you do have one, and it’s getting dusty somewhere in some remote corner of the internet – neglected for roughly as long as we’ve all been hypnotised by social media.
My own blog – and notice that I haven’t actually given you the website address or anything, because that’s not what I’m really trying to do here – I’m just trying to enthuse you to do your own – my own blog predates LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, which isn’t even called Twitter anymore. I set it up in, I think, 2002, but maybe 2003. I’m really glad I have it. I love it so much.
I really think everyone should have a blog. We can link to each other3. Blogs were the original social media: lots of links from one to another.
In the last few years, as we’ve been captured by these siloed, closed-off, walled-garden social media things, the whole internet has become less generous, less open to sending people from here to there, freely to find whatever they want and whatever they need.
Anyway, all of this posting to my own website is a small act of digital independence. Why don’t you give it some thought?
Thanks for listening. I’m going to leave it there. Bye for now.
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1 A whole month. Yeah, I can hear you now going, “My goodness, daily for a whole month, no chance!” But I DO think it’s a good idea.
2 Substack. It’s also turning into yet another walled garden, constantly pushing its app on writers and readers alike, which is quite annoying.
3 Link to each other. Right now, off the top of my head, I’d share links to (check these out!) the following:
- Brian Jenner’s search for visionary young speech-makers and
- Jane Hindmarch’s beautiful paintings and drawings of gardens, and
- Jenni Murphy, another artist, who has wonderful talent for building community with people who enjoy her work.
- And this thing I had no idea I needed to read, but guess what, I did.
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