It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so I figured I’d have another go. 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging Anil Dash, one of my favorite bloggers and all-around brilliant Internet statesman on the practicalities of blogging he’s learned over the years. Taken The insidious, and largely unknown, policy of civil forfeiture allows police departments to strip people of their property without due process. The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy
I’m a huge WordPress fan. that’s no secret. I’ve been using it since 2007 for pretty much every site (blog or otherwise) that I’ve built. I write plugins and themes for it. I’ve fully invested my personal website and blogging experience in the WordPress ecosystem. That’s why, when I learned about Known a couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma. Known seems to embody the same principles and goals as WordPress: federated content, control of what you publish, open source codebase, distributed community, the list goes on.
Not 24 hours after I wrote my post about blogging, .Net Magazine announced they were closing down their site and migrating their top 500 articles to Creative Bloq. That’s a far cry from the close to 10,000 articles on their site, spanning a long history of the web and its evolution. These articles were a de facto historical archive of how the web has changed over the years, and techniques that have come and gone.
“Blogging is dead, [social network du jour] is where it’s at.” You’ve likely heard that phrase at least seven times once, whether you’re a blogger or not. It’s a popular refrain any time a new service comes along that gets hugely popular and becomes the place where everybody publishes all their stuff. Usually this mentality is driven not by an affinity for the service in question, but an impression of the issues around maintaining a blog - it’s too much work, nobody will read it, it has to have brilliant posts on a regular basis, it’s too narcissistic.
The Family That Tweets Together Stays Together [NPR: Shots] Silicon Valley’s All Twttr [GigaOM] The terrorist as rock star [Dave Fargo] The Problem With Medium [Medium] Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism [The Atlantic]
I’ve started posting here with greater frequency as of late, which has made me remember how much I enjoy doing so. I’ve also started reading more personal blogs of friends and online acquaintances, and I’ve noticed something that hadn’t really dawned on me before: shorter posts are better. Part of the problem I’ve had with writing regularly is the amount of time and effort involved in crafting a full blog post.
I have decided that in the year 2008, I’m really going to make my blog a priority. I’m resolving to add a new post at least every other day, and will hopefully be able to make it every day. That’s why between now and January 1st, I’m going to devote time to coming up with new topics and post ideas to provide fresh content to readers on a regular, frequent basis.
Skribit is a new blog widget created by Startup Weekend Atlanta to allow readers to suggest topics to bloggers to write about. You simply place it on your site, and readers can post ideas for topics. It’s currently in closed beta (it was only created this weekend, brainstorm to product), but I’m anxious to be able to try it out. Skribit was officially launched this morning, and as stated in the FAQ section of their site, it’s still in “closed beta” so it’s unavailable to the general public.
