Do you still need a blog to blog?
Not generally, but for people like me? We communicate our lives, by necessity not choice, in phrases, pictures, soundbites. We narrate our days in imagery and our exploits in links. Maybe it’s time to try a new approach, to move Feastcraft to Posterous or Tumblr, retain the URL, and move from once-a-week long-form to twice-daily curation of images, links, videos, and the occasional rant.
There’s been changes around these parts as well (more on that after a month of numbers and stats, then I’ll talk about it), but Jonas Luster lays out the thinking that many of us have had.
Here’s what I will say just now… In eight years time my blog will still be here, just as it was eight years ago. Let’s see if the same is true of Posterous, Tumblr, MySpace or Friendster.
You’re a professional, so coughing up the equivalent of 2 pints of beer every month to your webhost isn’t a problem. For most folks however, free is rather tempting.
Very fair point, but at the same time I’d always make sure that you;re with a service that can export your data in something standard. And isn’t “your name online” worth something more than 1.5p a day for a domain and basic hosting?
To most people, their name online doesn’t mean diddly. It’s what their friends think of them, not some strangers in meat space. And if they do care what the dog behind the monitor thinks of them, then they’re simply vain.
Show me somebody not vain and I’ll find a song about them by Carly Simon.
It’s not so much about cost vs. free (I am running so many services and sites, taking the blog out makes barely a dent) but simple contemplations of engagement. The very post Ewan linked got three comments on the post and about forty on Facebook and G+ combined. I feel like I am failing to capture community and have, essentially, surrendered my data and community by force to the “sharing” sites (where “sharing” == “you share, we collect, now we own it”).
And I am just not sure I want to run a 200 visitors / day blog with all the effort I stick into it when I have a stab at 5000 visitors simply by submitting to the sharing overlords and staying within their walled gardens.