Tag Archives: Blogging

02.07.13
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Toward a Theory of Quitting Stuff on the Internet

Scott Smith has some thoughts about why he stopped posting to Tumblr:

With a presence on various platforms – here, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr – I’ve been wondering how to balance them all without publishing the same stuff in every space. In particular, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to get myself to blog more. If you’re a writer, you tend to write because you have something in you that needs to be expressed. And writing it – as opposed to putting it in a song or delivering a monologue – is the best way to express it.

I’ve always marveled at people with the ability to populate 3, 4, 5 different social networks consistently (Scott being one of them), because I’ve never been able to do it myself. I can barely sustain a Twitter account on most days. One of the reasons I wanted to try blogging here again was that I figured if I’m going to have the energy to write anything else I might as well do it here, the one place on the internet I’ve managed to keep running all these years. Like Scott says, I might as well do it in a place I control:

It just became too important to me to own as much of the work I was doing online as possible. I’ll still post regularly on Twitter because what it gives me is as great as what I feel I’m giving to it. Tumblr stopped delivering on its end of that bargain so I found another way to keep writing.

I’ve tried using Tumblr half a dozen times, and I think it’s fun and extremely easy to use. If I were starting a brand new blog I’d probably use it, but I always struggled with the problem of what I’d actually do there. Share links and photos? Isn’t that what Twitter is for? Write essays? Isn’t that what my blog is for? I couldn’t ever find a place for it, and a big reason is because I had this blog, which for better or worse, is the place where people can find me.

Starting out on a new network and building a following always felt like too much work. Worse, it felt like I was cheating on this place, not to mention feeling like I had nothing new to say. Maybe it’s a matter of precedent. I started writing online (or anywhere really) on this blog, and that set my expectations for how to *be* online. Maybe Tumblr is the baseline for the youngs now and blogging on WordPress feels weird. Whatever tools you use for expressing yourself online, you need to have a plan to make it worthwhile. And part of that plan is knowing when to pull the plug.

PS: I started to write this as a comment on Scott’s blog and then I was all, “Screw that man, let’s do this old school trackback style” and responded to him here. Blogging!

01.07.13
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Lessons from 12 Years of Blogging

Anil Dash wrote something last month about how much the web has changed since the early aughts, when all the coolest geeks had their own blog and no one knew a thing about “social media.” It made me wistful for the old days, and now that it’s a new year I feel like giving this old thing another try.

I started this site 12 years ago. That’s longer than my marriage, longer than any job I’ve held, longer than I’ve lived anywhere since I was a kid. Even though I stopped and started blogging here too many times to count, that’s a long time. I feel like that counts for something on the web and I ought to give it some love.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m thinking it’ll be some combination of old fashioned blogging with the longer personal essays I’ve been doing for a couple years. My interest in blogging waned when I started using Twitter, but I’ve always felt something missing when I wanted to write a few paragraphs about something and be done with it. So here we are.

To get started, I moved everything from my own WordPress install to WordPress.com because I figured it was time to get out of the business of running my own blog software (more on that later). I spent the weekend fixing broken links and restoring images that didn’t make it in the transfer, and it gave me a chance to read through a lot of my old stuff and think about what this little project has meant to me. Here are some general observations:

  • All told I moved 1,042 posts with 631 tags over 12 years of archives. For a long time I’ve kept most of that stuff private/unpublished because I only wanted to show off my capital W “Writing,” but I figure if I’m going to give this thing a chance again I should just own it and put everything back online. So enjoy all those old political rants and pictures of my dog.
  • Looking back, a lot of what I used to post here is probably stuff I would just post on Twitter or Facebook today. I wonder if I would’ve ever started a blog if I’d had those tools back then.
  • The first things I put on this site were little anecdotes and essays my friends wrote. I envisioned it as some kind of online magazine, and even after I started posting mostly my own stuff, they kept sending me links and pictures because they didn’t have anywhere else to post them online. Now that everybody’s mom can post videos about 20 different ways from a cell phone, it’s weird to think that it used to take quite a bit of technical knowhow to put a couple pictures online.
  • Flickr really was awesome back in the day.
  • And remember what a big deal moblogging used to be?
  • I have a group of 5-6 friends from college who used to read what I posted every day, leave comments and generally make fun of me. It was really fun, and those comment threads make me laugh even today. I guess people do that kind of thing on Facebook now, but it’s not the same. I miss it.
  • I’m now on my sixth different technology for running this site, and I have to say it’s astounding how simple and easy it is to run a blog today. I started in 2001 making web pages in Microsoft Frontpage, then I moved it to the first version of Blogger that generated HTML pages and FTPed them to a server. After that I used an early version of Movable Type that made you run your own SQL scripts to set it up, then I used the self-hosted WordPress from its beginnings up until now. You kids have it too easy today.
  • Speaking of all that moving, I’m amazed I never lost any of that old stuff in the process. The oldest posts on this site are the same ones I pushed out of Frontpage in 2001. Yay me for planning well.
  • And when I was working on setting up the new site this weekend, I told Debbie I don’t think it matters what the finished product looks like. I just like puttering around on a website for a hobby, like some people enjoy gardening or playing a musical instrument. It’s a combination of writing + mid-level computer geekery that’s right in my wheelhouse.

A final technical note: When I first registered the “wood-tang.com” domain, I didn’t really think about how that worked as a web address. I just did it that way because that’s how I used to write my stupid nickname. Over the years I learned it’s kinda lame to have a dash in a URL and it’s bothered me ever since. I bought the “woodtang.com” domain a couple years ago and didn’t know what to do with it, but when I moved the site I figured out how to make it work. If I mapped the domains and set all my nameservers correctly, everything should point here, sans dash, no matter how you type the address. Technology!

So I’m excited. Can you feel it? I’ll see you later this week. Or not.

03.27.11
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Where is your online home?

Consider this a follow up to my post about personal blogging. I had an idea today for a new side project, a blog where I’d like to write about something that doesn’t really fit in here. When I was thinking about how to set it up, I had to stop and consider if I wanted to make a standalone blog at all because there is a social network that already fits all my needs. I wouldn’t have to bother with settings, templates, and boilerplate copy, and I’d have a built-in audience as soon as I connected to a few of my friends. I haven’t decided if I want to do it yet, but if I do I’m going to build out my own site, mainly because I don’t like using the other site that could fill this niche. But the interesting thing to me was that I had this conversation with myself at all.

Anyone who spends a lot of time online has an idea of their online “home,” the place where they spend the most time, participate in a community, post the most stuff, etc. For most people these days I suspect it’s Facebook, but it could be as simple as an email account or a portal site like Yahoo. For the longest time I thought of this site as my home, because if anyone wanted find out about what’s going on with my life, they could find it here. Anything else I did online like Flickr or delicious was an adjunct account to augment the blog. This was the starting point. But now after over three years on Twitter, it’s the first place I’d tell people to find me online. I think it just has to do with frequency; I’m on Twitter all the time, posting my own stuff and replying to other people. As I said before, it’s taken up a lot of what I used to do here. It takes up the primary mental space, everything else I do online flows through there somehow. This site, on the other hand, has taken a backseat to serve a more specialized purpose. Instead of being the all-purpose Matt Wood clearinghouse (and we know the world needs that), it’s now the place where I write longer stuff because that’s what suits this particular tool best.

Scott Rosenberg commented on my post about personal blogging that blogs may seem to be in decline because we simply have more tools to choose from for doing our thing online. What we used to think of a blogs are more heavyweight, and social networking sites pick up a lot of the rest. The reverse chronological blogging format has also become so tightly incorporated into the rest of the web that you could argue that most sites are really blogs, or have very blog-like elements, at their cores. You’d be hard pressed to find a news site or social network that doesn’t use that format in some shape or form. So maybe what I was talking about in that last post is that blogs have shifted from being the focal point of our online lives to having a more specialized purpose. They’re still important, but they’re no longer home.

03.12.11
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Montaigne and the Lost Art of Personal Blogging

I got into a Twitter conversation with Tim Carmody this morning over a piece in the New York Times Book Review by Anthony Gottlieb about three new books that revisit the work of Michel de Montaigne, a 16th century Frenchman who is known as the father of the essay. Like just about everyone who has written about Montaigne since 2003, Gottlieb points out that he is known as the “first blogger,” because his meandering and personal writing style predated what we can now find on thousands of Blogspot accounts today. It’s a fine comparison and I’m not saying Gottleib or anyone else who points this out is wrong, but as Tim and I discussed, what Montaigne did doesn’t exactly fit the definition of what we now think of as blogging.

In the early days of widespread blogging, after Blogger and Movable Type expanded the form beyond the tech-savvy pioneers who had been hand-coding their link recommendations, it was largely a personal medium.* The tools were simple: you had a text box, a place to add a title, and a button that said “Publish.” All you could really do was write and maybe add a link or a picture if you knew the HTML tags, so the first thing people started to do with blogs was to write about themselves (to the extent that they wrote about anything else, it was about what exactly blogs were in the first place). It wasn’t until after September 11 the subsequent Blue State-Red State culture wars that it turned into the type of abbreviated New Media/Journalism we know today.

I studied creative nonfiction in grad school, which can cover any kind of nonfiction narrative from magazine profiles to memoirs to rather long versions of bread recipes (I’ve seen it). I always thought blogs were the perfect place for this kind of artful, well-crafted, and personal-yet-universal kind of storytelling. This morning Tim mentioned Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Atlantic as someone who still writes this style of blog, a “mix of past/present, personal/public, frankness/literary voice.” But where are the rest? In my own internet circles, the only people I can think of who still blog in a personal style (or keep their own blog at all, for that matter) fall into three categories: parenting blogs, sites tied to specific events like trips or weddings, and “Julie & Julia”-type projects. The rest write for topical publications or use things like Tumblr or Posterous for posting links, photos, etc.

Maybe this is just the natural evolution of publishing on the internet. Now that we can do more than write blocks of text, the Tumblr style of blogging makes more sense. Montaigne revealed the details of his personal life and explored the workings of his mind the way he did because writing was the only outlet he had. Given access to modern technology, maybe he would have taken to recording confessional YouTube videos, or posting pictures of his meals on Tumblr. Obviously some people aren’t comfortable writing about themselves, and many who are scratch that itch with Twitter and Facebook.

I’m biased because I’m still trying to resuscitate my own form of personal blogging here, but it seems like a missed opportunity that people have turned away from it. For me it’s more about the process of writing than the final result. I learn things by writing about myself. It helps me figure out my place in the world and how to deal with the daily grind. It’s not about the audience, but knowing that someone else might read it helps me clarify and shape my thoughts into something more than a hidden journal entry. I think a big reason for the decline in more literary personal blogging is that once someone starts to take their writing seriously, they insist on sending it to “real” publications. Blogging doesn’t count anymore, that’s why what you see on blogs now is so ephemeral. But why hide your best work? I’ve been on the other side at a literary magazine, reading and rejecting hundreds of essays that may never see the light of day unless someone like me gives it my approval. So why leave it up to me if you think it’s worth reading? You have an empty text box and a button that says “Publish” right there.

* Check out Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters for an excellent history of blogging.

11.25.09
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So yeah, Tumblr

Long-time Wood-Tang followers know that I make a habit of saying I’m going to quit blogging and close up shop, only to return a few weeks later with some sheepish excuse about why I really need it. I got to the point where I don’t even believe myself when I start thinking such things, and I taught myself to hold off on making such declarations any more. But I did want to point out that I’m using Tumblr again, mainly because it’s so damn fun.

I tried hard over the past couple months to turn this site into one of those Andrew Sullivan/Jason Kottke-style, quick hit, link-heavy blogs that I’ve always wanted to run, but the thing is, doing that with a standard blog platform like WordPress is a real pain in the ass and hard to manage when it isn’t your full-time job (see examples above). I really wish I could keep everything I do online in one place, but the ease with which you can toss off a link, quotation, picture, etc into Tumblr without breaking stride is just too much to resist. And while I’ve cured myself of the nasty habit of regurgitating every word Merlin Mann types, he hit it on the head with Tumblr:

I came to Tumblr because I wanted to revive a beloved and long-mothballed blog. And that choice became, as they say, a non-brainer once I saw the Tumblr bookmarklet. It’s one of the smartest and most friction-free bits of computer functionality it’s ever been my pleasure to use. Punto.

Now widely aped to varying success, Tumblr’s contextual bookmarklet has changed the way I use the web. It’s partly why I now recommend Tumblr to anyone who doesn’t want the burden of a “real blog,” but who’s also interested in giving the internet something more substantial than a one-hundred-character complaint about their meal and the person who served it — people who have that itch to share lovely bits of the world that come over their transom throughout the day without stopping the other things they’re working on.

So, as the kids say, fuck yeah Tumblr. If you’re interested in links, contextless photos, and Sesame Street hip-hop videos, check it out. I’m not sure what this means for how I balance what I write here vs what I post there. I suspect it will just be a matter of word count. If it’s something simple that I just want to post without much elaboration, I’ll put it on Tumblr. And if I find myself forming an actual strong opinion over multiple paragraphs, I’ll post it here. No promises, I may stop and start and let either of these places lay fallow at any given time. But at least I won’t announce it again.

10.06.09
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Those Pro Bloggers Have Some Nerve

One of the hottest topics in the blogosphere today, no doubt, is the Federal Trade Commission’s ruling that bloggers have to disclose any freebies, favors, and financial incentives from advertisers when they review said companies’ products on their sites. As I read about the news this morning, I thought, “Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about disclosing any conflicts of interest.”

I sat back and sipped my glass of delicious, Florida’s Natural orange juice, fresh from the world’s finest groves in the Sunshine State, and said to myself, “That takes lot of nerve to plug products without telling people you got them for free.” Thankfully, I had my iPhone 3GS from Apple, the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet, to jot down my thoughts. There’s an app for that you know: Evernote, where you can save your ideas, things you see, and things you like, then find them all on any computer or device you use.

I slipped on my North Face windbreaker, the one that inspires me to never stop exploring, and headed to work. Those pro bloggers have some nerve.

08.19.09
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Tumblr Gets Cooler

Oh sure, just when I decide Tumblr and I need to start seeing other people, they go and add a bunch of cool features like hashtags and Facebook integration. Of course, my beef was never with the Tumblr platform–in fact, I wish you could implement that kind of content styling and ease of posting in WordPress without installing 4200 plugins. I just decided I needed to return back to Shaolin here.

08.15.09
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If This Blog Sucked I'd Have to Charge You

Why is this blog so good? Because if it wasn’t, I’d have to pay people to read it, says Northwestern economics professor Jeff Ely:

Bloggers have such a strong incentive to have their writings read that they would really like to pay their readers. But for various reasons they can’t and so the best they can do is set the price as low as possible. That is, as it often happens, the explanation for the unlikely bunching of prices at the same point is that we are all banging up against a binding constraint …

Now, typically when incentives are blunted by a binding constraint, they find expression via other means, distortionary means. And a binding price of zero is no different. Since a blogger cannot lower his price to attract more readers, he looks for another instrument, in this case the quality of the writing.

I guess that puts more pressure on me, because I’m all out of singles.

08.09.09
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Party Etiquette in the Age of Twitter

From today’s New York Times, No Twittering Allowed:

In an era, when a stray gripe about your boss can land you on an industry blog, when waking up hung over can frantically send you to Facebook to untag your name from photos of the previous night’s frosting-wrestling contest, when shots of you in unflattering jeans become part of your permanent Google search results, there are signs that some are tired of living their lives on the Web …

… there is an electronic evolution of manners, with still-developing rules about when using social media is appropriate and when it isn’t. In the early days, posting photos of adults in funny hats seemed harmless — everyone could be an Internet star. Now, six years after the start of Friendster, one of the first social networks, friends can feel like the new paparazzi.

It’s funny, as someone who’s written about myself online for almost nine years now, I’ve never had that moment of complete embarrassment or regret at something I posted online (or someone posted about me). I’ve made poor arguments and stuck my foot in my mouth maybe, but in terms of privacy, I’ve never had a line crossed.

Then again, most of my party days ended before everyone had a camera phone and a Twitter account, and my real world friends weren’t hardcore internet types either. Maybe I just dodged a bullet–I can sure think of a few things I did (or things that people told me I did) that I’m glad aren’t forever preserved in the ether.

08.04.09
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Bloggers, Don't Quit Your Day Job

Catching up on yesterday’s reading, a couple items about blogging caught my eye. First from Blogger Interrupted, on how blog traffic is down in general:

What does this mean? The economy certainly has something to do with this – a dirty little secret of blog reading is that most people read blogs at work. Less people are at work in front of a computer, and those who do have jobs where they can read blogs are being very careful about giving their employer a reason to can them, and are working harder, with less time to fritter away on blog reading. So there’s that. But I also think peer review in blogging has a role here, too; there is less curiosity factor among the wider online readership, and more filtering, i.e., blog readers are more discriminating. They now know precisely what they want, and they look for it.

I’m certainly a more discriminating blog reader too, but I also tend to skim more. I’ll stick with a blog if, say, one out of every three posts makes it worth my time. To me that’s both a product of knowing what I like and a good skills with an RSS reader. I still contend that if there is a decline in blog traffic, and blog writing for that matter, it’s because many people are using social networks instead. I just can’t see your average user going to the trouble of setting up a blog these days when they can share links, post photos, update status, etc on Facebook. The bloggers left either have a specific focus, are left over from the “golden age,” or are megalomaniacs (or all three, see: Wood-Tang.com).

Second was this piece from the Huffington Post by Michelle Haimoff, which, if you can read between the lines of what’s essentially a love letter to Arianna Huffington, raises some interesting points about blogging. Basically, the Haimoff is saying Huffington is such a genius because she convinced a bunch of smart people to write for her for free, and that’s okay because it’s such an honor to write for her. “[N]ot only are people willing to write for Arianna for free, she is also willing to let us write for her for free, something an old guard institution like the New York Times won’t even consider,” she says. Yes, those jerks at the Times again, insisting people be compensated for their work.

Well of course it’s smart for Arianna; building a multimillion dollar company on the backs of unpaid labor is pretty savvy. Haimoff may think it’s neat to write for the HuffPo for the glory, but that and a Gmail account will probably only get your another unpaid status gig someday. C. Max Magee had a nice take on this at The Millions:

There’s a voguish notion going around, espoused vocally by Chris Anderson as he stumps for his book Free but also creeping into job listings for any number of online publications, that you write for free in order to make a name for yourself and to get your personal brand out there. Once you’ve got sixty posts under your belt at HuffPo, the idea goes, you can take your “clips” and go find a paying gig or pitch a book or get speaking engagements.

If you are a good enough writer, you can probably jumpstart a career this way (though if you’re good enough you probably didn’t need a jumpstart in the first place), but do not operate under illusion that when someone invites you to write regularly for free, you are anything more than a cog in their pageview-generating machine. Paying writers nothing is just a way to increase profit margin.

So what I’m left with is that blogging is best left as a hobby you indulge surreptitiously at your day job. The old idea that you can blog your heart out and get “discovered” is a nonstarter, because A) all the paid blogging work goes to full-time journalists these days, and B) apparently not getting paid is what all the cool kids are doing anyway. Goodness, what a great time for me to pick up the baton again.