Andy Baio, “Middling”, 16th October 2014:
“Twitter’s for 140-character short-form writing1 and Medium’s for long-form. Weirdly, there really isn’t a great platform for everything in the middle — what previously would’ve just been called “blogging.” Mid-length blogging. Middling.
I think that’s partly why seeing Matt Haughey, Paul Ford, and Michael Sippey restart regular blogging on Paul’s delightfully retro tilde.club is so refreshing to me. I miss seeing people I admire post stuff longer than a tweet.
So I think I’ll try doing the same thing here. In the early days of Waxy.org, before I launched the linkblog, I used to blog short posts constantly. Multiple times a day. Twitter and Waxy Links cannibalized all the smaller posts, and as my reach grew, I started reserving blogging for more “serious” stuff — mostly longer-form research and investigative writing.
Well, fuck that. I miss the casual spontaneity of it all, and since I’m pretty sure hardly anybody’s reading my site again after the death of Google Reader, the pressure’s off.
What do I have to lose?
Update: Nice, Gina Trapani’s in too.”
Four years on, how did all this work for Andy? Since he posted the above – and forgetting about his linkblog – he’s done 38 posts on waxy.org. An average of nearly 10 a year, although in fact the rate has really slowed – he’s only posted two so far in 2018.
Sadly, all three tilde.club sites he mentioned stopped updating by the end of 2015. As for Gina Trapani, whose post also contained lots of great ideas? She also stopped updating at the tail end of 2015, and her blog isn’t even online any more: it redirects to her professional site instead.
In contrast, since 16th October 2014, Dirty Feed has done 137 posts, including this one, with 23 posted this year. And I don’t even update this site nearly as much as I would like. Moreover, although the posts range from deep investigations to “hey, look at this”, there isn’t a single one which doesn’t have at least some kind of analysis of sorts.
* * *
OK, OK, I know. This looks like some kind of pathetic macho pissing contest. So yes, I fully admit: “how often you update your website” isn’t exactly the most useful metric when it comes to judging how your life is going.
I bring up the above just to point out: when it comes to keeping a blog updated, I have at least proved I know how to do it. And it’s very easy to blame social media when it comes to people finding this difficult. Hell, Andy Baio does it in the post above: he says Twitter “cannibalized all the smaller posts”. This seems to be a common thread: I’ve heard endless people talk about how the more they used Twitter, the less they blogged.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think this should be an either/or situation. Twitter is extremely good for coming up with ideas, thinking things though, and getting feedback… and then you can use all of that to write something a little more permanent on your own site. (And perhaps most importantly: under your control.)
A good example is my short post yesterday on why all television deserves a little theatrical sparkle; it all comes from this Twitter thread I posted a few days ago. I didn’t mean to come up with an outline for an article – I was just thinking aloud – but huge chunks of the language in those tweets actually ended up verbatim in the resulting post. Moreover, the post didn’t even take very long to write, because I’d already done a lot of the thinking behind it when writing that set of tweets.
And to me, the above seems obvious: obvious to the point that it seems weird even writing and publishing this post. But it always seems that Twitter and blogs are put into opposition: that Twitter is taking up all the time people used to spend writing on their own site. That might be true: but it doesn’t have to be the case.
You can have the best of both worlds: the ease and immediacy of Twitter, and the more thoughtful and permanent record of your own blog. It just involves you getting round to actually writing up that post, once you’ve done your thinking on Twitter. If you don’t want to do that, then fine – nobody is obligated. But blaming Twitter for it probably isn’t the best idea.
Personal sites will only die if we let them. Of all the many, many things we can currently blame Jack Dorsey for, this isn’t one of them.
Of course, since Andy wrote this post, Twitter now allows 280 characters per tweet. I don’t think this fundamentally affects his point, though. ↩