To blog

I started blogging in the summer of 2006. You can read my first post here. I changed blogs because I thought I would follow all of that advice about making everything more "professionally" focused, but that isn't who I am. I've been relieved to see that advice and mindset recede (at least in some corners) over the last few years.

I know the momentum of activity on the internet has moved to social media, but I just can't. I do like my very focused communities--on bullet journaling and everything people are really trying to get to, Gaslit Nation, a couple of servers on Discord, and even, on occasion, my library's review boards--but Social Media 2.0 hasn't made any improvements on the 1.0 versions. Bluesky degraded very quickly into the worst of Twitter, and Mastodon is unreadable. I have no desire to get into anything Meta puts out. I know there are more out there, but I have better things to do with my time than tinker every time a new website comes out.

Weird outlier: Goodreads. I still loathe Amazon, but many of the authors I enjoy post their blogs there. Some of them have led me to other amazing books, and some of them have led me to other communities. So while it will still be very rare for me to leave a review there, I am happy to check them a few times a week.

Another great source of information: Brooke Gladstone's On the Media radio show. She has led me to some great books as well as some great authors, as well as putting on a consistently informative show. 

But I digress. Then again, that's part of what blogs are for.

Blogs are a little easier to share with the world

 

I like blogs. I like writing one (believe it or not, given my output), but I also like reading them. I mean the ones that are written for their own sake, though they may have incidentally become an income stream or enhanced another. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with making money from your blogs, it's that the ways people do it don't encourage me to read. I love the old cooking blogs (please check out Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Post Punk Kitchen for an example of why), but even if the point of every post is to get me to buy some schlock off of Amazon so you can make a percentage of a penny off of the sales, please stop writing PAGES of text to describe how to make a grilled cheese. It doesn't fool anyone, and at the end of the day almost all of those types of posts aren't informative. You don't make me feel like I've learned anything; you make me feel like I've wasted my time.

I've been loving Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Cory Doctorow, Ann Wood, Austin Kleon, Elizabeth Spann Craig, Dr. Michael Greger, and Chris Guillebeau. (I've also loved Jenny Doh, but unfortunately she doesn't appear to be blogging anymore.) These people write for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is a desire to share, which in many cases is linked to an explicit desire to *grow*. That is a fantastic thing to witness in public and sometimes even participate in, and flies in the face of yet more ridiculous advice that we have to be perfect fonts of wisdom before we can present ourselves in any capacity to the world. I don't always agree with everything they write, but I do still love the way they write. I find just about all of them inspirational in some way, however earnest that may sound.

This year, I want to find more such places to go. (Yes, sometimes a good newsletter does the trick, but there is something about the history--the evolution--of ideas and projects that I take more comfort in.) For as much as the blog has been declared dead for the last decade, I don't think that's true, and in fact I think they're coming back. So point me to the new ones as they come up, but also point me to old favorites.