More than two decades ago, the internet opened up unlimited space for all of us to express our perspectives, thoughts, and voices through blogging. I started in 1999 myself.
Since then, social media has opened up more spaces, platforms, and channels for expression in so many other formats, photos, short posts, audios, videos, video shorts, etc etc etc.
Many content creators and influencers have crafted their ways to draw huge crowds, even while bad actors and bots have polluted the digital world with misinformation and spam. Algorithms have their own agenda to serve the profit motive of companies rather than the good of humanity and users. By contrast, newer platforms like Patreon and Substack, are bringing content creators directly to their audience through freemium subscription mechanisms. These are much more user-friendly than using blog readers to subscribe to RSS feeds; and, that’s a good thing. Hey, I have 2 substacks myself: camh.substack.com and generousasians.substack.com.
So where does that leave blogging in today’s world of digital publishing? I do see it as a useful format for content creation and distribution for the latest news & information by an individual, an organization, or a company. And, blogs done right are visible to search engines. This is most valuable for content discovery.
By contrast, the content of email newsletters are not searchable, be default. Social media isn’t always searchable, neither. And, AI (artificial intelligence) engines has to get its data by ingesting blogs and articles on the web, and other large language models. Aha, there’s another place where blogs can offer value.
All that to say, I believe blogging still has some value. There’s no longer one sure way to quickly or easily get content in front of the largest audience, unless you build an audience first through with lots of people clicking on your follow or subscribe button. 2024 is a time marker in that continuing ebb and flow of content creation, and who it will reach versus who is looking for it.
Tech note: I just migrated to a new web hosting service called Hostinger. Still running WordPress. Doing some housecleaning. And while I’m at it, noticed my blogging frequency had diminished several years ago. That probably happened around the time when social networks like Twitter (now X’d) and Facebook grew faster and faster. So that’s what prompted me to blog this.
Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash