Blogging has changed for me. A lot. But maybe not enough.

February 20, 2014 at 5:00 pm | In yulelogStories | 3 Comments

It’s not really bye-bye Berkman blog, but I have had my own domain for ages – and today I decided to post something there.

It’s about my perceptions of how blogging and online conversations have changed over the years.

3 Comments

  1. Not that I am one to talk…BUT…I have posted “long form” –for Facebook, anyway– on FB and ever so rarely on G+ simply because the reach and response is far better than on my blog. I barely keep the blog doors open, so rarely do entries appear there. What happens is I post something either in response to what I’ve read in FB, or that seems of note or worth to those who read me in their news stream –on Facebook. Because it lasts there (I capture the URL) then sometimes I repost it on my blog, to give some possible lasting value.

    There’s also the Findability Factor: FB posts are not go Google-friendly. The two companies have a difficult relationship which manifests itself in odd ways. Try finding a FB status post in Google. No can do. Try searching for something via FB: that’s a Bing search. Want a FB long form status entry to be Findable (translation: able to be successfully searched by Google)? Post it somewhere other than FB.

    My inclination to post occurs more often as a reaction or response to something else I may have read. Could be directly related, might just be an idea that some other post served up as a catalyst. Whatever the case may be the blog feels likes a lonesome outpost. I think I titled a blog post many years ago, “The Lonesome Blog.” But now it became unfindable, when I migrated my Manila blog (oh, do I ever miss that blogging software!) to a Drupal platform. Now I am taking Drupal courses so I can earn how to fix things, be more of a [somewhat] savvy Drupal tech-type, and maybe even repair the links of the hundreds of blog posts that lost their Findable way as a result of the changeover.

    First the hosting domain went from Weblogs.com (ah, the salad days) to buzzwords.com, then to deanland.com. Along the way came a slew of broken links, no redirects or automated way to channel those broken links to the follow-on domains.

    Since I began blogging in 1999 the community of bloggers has morphed many times over, as has the practice of blogging. Yule, your post (which prompts a great joke which I am presently holding in abeyance) is a thought starter, no question.

    Linking or reposting the works of others is a way of sharing (as FB calls it) and a good method of expanding reach and thought or discussion. Posting one’s own content, or having the digital soapbox on which to house it, is in many ways easier. And yet it seems as though the somewhat proprietary, self-contained outpost from which one blogged in the early days is now more of a relic than the standard.

    I share a great deal on FB. I doing so,with the content of others, it is a way of extending whatever my message or attitude(s) may be. The comments on FB strike me as more intense, more relevant, and almost completely devoid of flamers and trolls.

    It is late, and I fear I am rambling. Better I do that over at DeanLand than here, in keeping with what I perceive as blogging (or commenting) Best Practices.

    Comment by Deanland — February 21, 2014 #

  2. I like the idea of capturing the url of Facebook conversations (or somehow archiving them), Dean. And I agree that a LOT of the conversation has shifted to that platform. I think it speaks to how we do all want to be where the action is. And for some it’s on FB, for others more on Twitter, and still others on various forums of choice – when I still lived in Victoria, I spent a heck of a lot of time reading and posting (as Ms B Havin) to the VibrantVictoria.ca forum…
    .
    Also totally agree with the blog as the lonely outpost. I noticed (when I was still posting a bit more on this blog here) that it would generate comments on FB, while crickets chirped here. I think that, too, speaks to people’s needs to marshal their own attention, as in, “ok, I’m on FB anyway, and I’ll comment here, but don’t ask me to click through to your blog, go to your comments board there and wait to be ‘approved'” (an unfortunate necessity to avoid spam if you can’t install Disqus, as I can’t on this site since it’s a multi-user blog), etc. (Another unfortunate aspect of this comments software is that it doesn’t recognize paragraph breaks, only line breaks, which is why I insert a paragraph break, then a period, then another paragraph break. Sucks.)
    .
    I hear what you’re saying about “findability,” and it’s a good reason, I suppose, actually to post/ blog on your own site, and then just spread that url to the various platforms. Of course now we’re starting to talk about real work, and that gets back to the question of why are you doing this in the first place? Do you really value what you’re producing that much? Are you in it for some kind of remuneration? (I’ve already gone on about how I missed that boat entirely…) Is it just a personal journal? (In which case, is the work of SEO and propagating it across FB, Twitter, LinkedIn (if it’s related to a professional interest), Google+, etc. warranted? It’s enough to make your head spin, but not enough (unless you are canny about some kind of business model) to add anything to your purse. Then there are the personal costs (won’t go into it here), with swipes coming from unexpected quarters.
    .
    Anyway, I hope I’m not being too much of a downer. It’s certainly my problem if I can’t figure this out. The point seems, to me, to live a “rich” life, and for better or worse, that includes a lot of thinking about …stuff (much of it expressed in words, some of it maybe in images). I’m very serious about creating something beautiful, though. It’s like an antidote to all this useless worrying, at which I’m at least a Bronze medal champion. 😛

    Comment by Yule — February 21, 2014 #

  3. […] Heibel Ok, Dean – I responded on my blog (the Berkman one: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/…/blogging-has-changed…/ ), and then posted a link to that to my post on my own blog […]

    Pingback by Follow-ups on Facebook to What Has Happened to Non-Commercial Blogging — February 26, 2014 #

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