Photographer. Podcaster. Blogger. Reverse Engineer.
Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.
After 15 years on this domain and 24 years blogging in total I agree with Austin. Writing is how I think.
Matt Webb finds himself on a bit of a tear on his personal blog:
I’ve now been writing new posts for 24 consecutive weeks. Multiple posts a week. How on earth? I just calculated it, and I’ve added the live streak count to the site footer. I wonder how long I can keep it up.
He goes on to list his 15 rules for blogging. I prefer to call them goals rather than rules but it is his blog who am I to say?
That said, I don’t personally agree with every single one of his rules. My favorite is likely #14. However, writing is like dieting, do whatever works for you. There are no rules.
Relevant, perhaps, to his list are my personal blogging tips. Maybe you can take what Webb writes and what I’ve written and come up with your own.
Khoi Vihn, in an interview on Own Your Content:
It’s hard to overstate how important my blog has been, but if I were to try to distill it down into one word, it would be: “amplifier.” Writing in general and the blog in particular has amplified everything that I’ve done in my career, effectively broadcasting my career in ways that just wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Same for me. Nearly every opportunity I’ve ever had has come as a result of my blog. I know this sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t. Yes Twitter helped (when I had an early account with thousands of followers, etc). Yes going to events all over the world helped. But it all came back to my blog.
Also, my blog has helped me to form, confirm, or reject my own ideas and hypothesis. I cannot even count the number of times I’ve started a blog post (read: rant) on a particular topic only to completely change my stance on it by the time I was done writing. Writing is how I think and I write on my blog.
/via Patrick Rhone on Micro.blog Discover.
Ton Zijlstra, replying to Frank Meeuwsen’s post that was replying to my post, took a different angle:
Over the last 16 years my blog has been a good instrument to trigger, feed and explore my curiosity. Me blogging more means I’m curious to expand my horizons again.
His post reminded me of a discussion that came up in 2013 on the blogosphere… writing is how I think. And still to this day, my blog is where I form ideas and hypothesis regarding my own interests.
Don’t let people tell you blogging is dead. Seems alive and well to me.
Mark Boulton, on asking people to formally write down their requests:
Next time someone asks you to do something, try it. I bet 3 times out of 10, they say ‘oh it doesn’t matter’. You’ll have that time back. They’ll be a little wiser and have a lower heart rate.
Good post. Jump over to his blog and read it. I may take something from this and instill it in my new job.
/via Jeremy Keith.
To celebrate the 30th anniversay of a show that has had a large impact on my life I’m going to write a TNG related blog post every day this month. Why? Why not!
TNG being Star Trek: The Next Generation. Let’s see if he keeps it up. I’m rooting for him.
It’s always a little weird glancing at my visitor stats and seeing that someone has read a post that no longer reflects my position.
100% agree. Most of my posts are out-of-date and my opinions have changed slightly since I’ve written them.
I love this bit:
This is why I always refer to the blog as an ongoing conversation with myself – it is the public manifestation of working things out in my head.
That is why I say that writing is how I think. See also.
Jen Simmons, on her blog:
So I have nothing much to say in this post. Or more honestly, I have so freaking much to say, I don’t know where to start. So I’m going to start here. I just need to break the silence. And get into a habit of posting. So I’m posting this. And I’m going to publish it without thinking about it. Without proof-reading it really. Without thinking about how it will be received.
Stop worrying. Hit publish.
Me, in September:
My blog archive is a source of both pride and head shaking. Why did I write about that? Why did I allow myself to publish that? But, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Yup.
Jeremy Keith wrote on his blog about owning his words, or, being willing to publish his words (snarky or otherwise) on his own site under his own name. I recommend you read his entire post.
But this bit stood out:
I wish I could articulate how much better it feels to only use Twitter (or Medium or Facebook) as a syndication tool, like RSS.
I feel the same way. I sort of tried to articulate the more tangible results of publishing from my site first in Observations about “tweeting” from my site. But let me get into a bit more detail here about not just tweeting but publishing in general.
By publishing to my own web site first…
As Jeremy said, I own my words and photos and audio bits. I love it. As I said in the observations post and even as I wrote earlier this morning; I wish everyone did this.
Deanna Mascle wrote on her blog on why all teachers should write. In it she says this about why students should write in every class every day:
Reflective writing at the beginning of a class or before a lesson can help students access existing knowledge and build a foundation for new information. Writing activities during a lesson can reinforce new knowledge and help students connect it to their existing framework. Writing after a lesson can serve multiple purposes from supporting knowledge transfer to fostering memory development to demonstrating comprehension. Plus, creative projects can increase engagement which in turn improves learning and retention of knowledge. Writing (if you do it right) is active learning. Writing (if you do it right) is fun. Writing (if you do it right) is meaningful.
See also this bit I linked to from Mascle about one year ago.
I think everyone should write. And I also think everyone should write publicly. So many are willing to write SMS messages or Facebook status updates… but what if you took just one of those ideas and fleshed them out? What if you took the time to take one of those tirades about the cost of strawberries at the local market and examined it from all perspectives; farmer, distributor, grocer, customer? By doing this you’d be teaching yourself, as you write, and if you still felt compelled enough with your argument to hit publish, everyone would be better for it.
Deanna Mascle on her blog in February of this year:
Blogging isn’t for everyone, but as I must write to think and process life, blogging is a gift (What Blogging Taught Me). I hope my blog benefits others, but I cannot measure the positive impact blogging has had on my life.
Then, yesterday, in a follow-up post she wrote:
For myself and for my students, blogging is a reflection tool as well as a tool to share what we are thinking, learning, and doing with either our community or the greater world.
Whenever I slack here on my blog I regret it, not because I lose readership or traffic (I do not track those numbers at all so I have no idea what they are), but because I tend not to think as clearly as when I’m consistent in writing. Here’s an excerpt from this by me in 2013:
But writing, for me, is my way of deep thinking. I then get to edit my thoughts. What a beautiful idea! To write something down that you‘re thinking about and, rather than the thought simply going away, you can go back and and begin to craft that idea and mold your own opinion until you can fully come to a conclusion.
Great post by Deanna. Inspiration for me to get writing and thinking a bit.
Sally Kerrigan, on A List Apart:
When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has.
Totally agree. I also find speaking in front of people helps too. Defending what you’ve built goes even one step further and can really begin to solidify vision or break it down completely.
Related: Writing is how I think.
Yesterday Chris Dixon tweeted a link to this thought-provoking blog post by Cal Newport about needing downtime to truly get into deep work. I agree with much of it, such as this nugget:
If you’re looking for the next Tao, in other words, ignore the guy checking e-mail while running to his next meeting, and look instead towards the quiet fellow, staring off at the clouds, trying to figure out what to do with his afternoon.
I’m no mathematician or someone who ever expects to think deeply enough and work hard enough to get a Nobel or Pulitzer or the like… but I am someone who tries very, very hard to think both short-term and long-term. I make time to think about 3 months, 12 months, or even further into the future and to begin planning for those days ahead.
Yesterday I tweeted that I did not agree with Newport fully. Particularly what didn’t sit right with me was this statement:
As a professor who also blogs, I know that posts are something you do only when you have down time. I conjecture, therefore, that Tao’s large volume of posting implies he enjoys a large amount of down time in his professional life.
I’m probably picking at nits here but I do not believe that writing on one’s blog should be considered something that is only done during down time or free time. And now that I’ve re-read Newport’s post a few times I do not believe he meant it that way. I don’t think he meant that writing on one’s blog is frivolous or that it can only be done when you have absolutely nothing else to do. I believe he simply means that one needs to find the time or take the time needed to think and that isn’t done by people who jam pack their days with meetings, email, Twitter and the like.
Sorry for misunderstanding you at first Cal.
So, in the end. I totally agree. In fact, when I said that I make time to think, what I actually mean is that I make time to write. When I’m thinking I’m usually writing. Not every post sees the light-of-day. Not by a long shot. I feel very much like Fred Wilson in his post Writing It Down:
As all of you know, I write every day. It is my discpline, my practice, my thing. It forces me to think, articulate, and question. And I get feedback from it.
I write every day. I don’t publish every day like Fred does. I wish I did. I probably should. But writing, for me, is my way of deep thinking. I then get to edit my thoughts. What a beautiful idea! To write something down that you’re thinking about and, rather than the thought simply going away, you can go back and and begin to craft that idea and mold your own opinion until you can fully come to a conclusion.
Perhaps that is what Terry Tao, the subject of Newport’s post, is doing. Maybe he’s like me. Maybe he writes things down as a way of thinking through his ideas. A cursory glance at his blog leads me to think this is true.
Another example of people that use writing as a way to think and provide feedback is Asymco who uses their posts and community to begin a dialog around data and to learn what the data tells them. They form an opinion or a set a ideas and facts based on the data they have, they post that to the web, and hope that the community will help them to confirm their findings or to help them throw them out and come do different conclusions.
Make time to write. You’ll think better.
Colin Walker: “Should replies be posts?”
Colin Walker, in a post on whether or not replies to other posts (or, comments) should be their own posts:
I struggle with this a lot.
It is likely the point I should have made in my post regarding Micro.blog becoming a commenting service (and the fact that I don’t like that). I don’t want to reply on my blog to every reply to my posts on M.b because then I would have dozens and dozens of posts on my blog that would be very tough for readers to follow contextually. I believe the commenting mechanism that has been around for decades, even un-threaded, is far more useful than dozens of desperate posts stitched together loosely with a link that says “in reply to”.
Webmention attempts to bridge that gap between post and reply but that also is tough to follow along if the thread gets unwieldy.
However, I also don’t want to reply to every reply on my posts directly on M.b either (though, I do from time-to-time) as that isn’t much better than using any other silo like Twitter or Facebook. Should M.b go away, all of those conversations would be lost.
This isn’t a new issue nor is it exclusive to M.b. If I replied on my own blog to other people’s posts on their own blogs (like I am in this post to Colin Walker’s blog) then one side of the conversation could disappear at any time. I can only control my side of the equation. But at least if I have my own blog I have control of that one side.
I think it is good that these topics are being discussed again. The same debates have been swirling since blogging began, they swelled again when the indieweb movement began to take shape, and I think they are happening again as a result of M.b’s growing community. I do not believe there is one single answer to many them. You have to do what is right and sustainable for you.
For now, here are my personal rules for replying to posts. These will most definitely change over time.
As an aside: I know some of you do not want to leave a public comment. I love getting reader emails. I get a fair number of them. And some of them have been excellent conversations. So please don’t hesitate.
* I no longer have a Twitter or Facebook account. I do have a M.b account but I’m beginning to wonder if I need one as I have my own fully functional weblog. If I didn’t and I wanted a microblog and didn’t want to use Twitter, I could see having an account. If I wanted a more fully featured blog I still believe WordPress is the best tool for that. Also, I’m sure as the M.b community grows it could mean that my content would be discovered by more people. I think M.b may end up being a thriving, well run, community and service. It is why I backed Manton’s efforts via Kickstarter. But, if I have my own blog, and if I really don’t care much about my content being discovered, then I see little reason to syndicate to it. For the time being I’m still going to as I want to see how the service matures.
September 4, 2017