Reflecting on 30 days of blogging
I hit the 30 day streak of daily blogging!
Some thoughts:
It was mostly easier than I thought. Before I knew it, I was on day 28 and 29.
The pressure to blog daily forced me to phone it in a few days. I would say that the quality wasn’t there all the time, but maybe that’s a good thing. I found in the past that thinking every post needed to be epic stopped me from posting at all.
I’m not sure if I want to continue to post everyday But I like the idea of writing something everyday, but posting when something is ready.
Day 17
I passed the half-way point of my 30-day daily blogging challenge.
When I first started Obsessed it felt daunting thinking about carving out time to write and fill up my blog.
Daily blogging has been a great reminder to focus on the system rather than the outcome.
A blog filled with post will take care of itself if I’m blogging daily.
I already have 17 more post than I did when I started!
This is something I’m trying to apply in other areas of my life, like drawing and my health routine.
The return of the personal blog
The Verge recently argued for a personal blogging renaissance.
We seem to be on the same page. Obsessed.blog was started out of nostalgia for personal blogging.
Will it ever return to its glory days?
I doubt it.
The “rewards” from alternatives like Tik Tok are more enticing.
Will more influential people start doing it?
It's possible.
I think sharing and telling stories is in our DNA. It builds communities.
Blogging (and writing for that matter) works your thinking muscles. Blogging daily has sharpened my thinking.
It's also a great way to organize photos and thoughts that usually sit in Notepad and Photos.
I’m hoping the general distaste for social media these days will push a good handful to start their own blogs.
On daily blogging
E.B. White’s amazing writing nook
I left Twitter after Elon Musk's takeover, which was a total shitshow.
It was the cringey Dad-joke moment Musk where I felt it all jumped the shark.
The truth is, I've been reevaluating my relationship with social media long before Musk bought Twitter.
I’ve been nostalgic for the early days of blogging. When we didn't know what SEO was or what we should do for the algorithm.
The first website I built was an Austin Powers fansite / personal blog when I was 14. I created animated gifs of Austin Powers for some reason, and made almost daily journal entries. This was before there dedicated blogging platforms, so I did this all by hand via HTML.
Later, I moved on to Xanga, then Livejournal, then Tumblr, before settling on Wordpress and Squarespace.
Ahhh, the good old days
It was so pure and fun back then.
I decided to take a few pages from Austin Kleon and do a 30-day challenge to blog daily. (For my reward I’ll get myself a nice long massage.)
It's funny how I used to look forward to getting home so I could fire up Livejournal and just write. I wrote about anything and everything. While I got a nice shot of endorphins when a someone would comment, that was never the goal. I seemed to write and put things out into the ether just to put it out there.
To leave a trace of me in the universe.
I want more of that.
Shaped by the algorithm
I started using Feeder.co to read blogs, and it’s giving me so many great memories of late web 1.0/early web 2.0.
Right now I’m mostly reading personal blogs, like those by Austin Kleon and Derek Sivers. Both have very early web 2.0 vibes to them — personal, covering a wide range of topics, without any regard to SEO.
“Shaped by the algorithm” is a term used to describe the sameness we see with a lot of content on the web and social media these days.
A type of content gets a lot of views, likes, and clicks.
Algorithms recognize this and promote it.
More people see it and decide to create similar content because it gets more views, likes, and clicks. (This concept is also why Marvel movies all look and feel the same.)
This sucks for creativity and discovery.
For creators, I think it’s a good time to start thinking/living/creating outside of algorithms.