Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal.
Source: Bring back personal blogging – The Verge
My first exposure to blogging was during a project I joined (more like, weaseled my way into) that was looking to put wee blogs on phones that folks could search for and engage with (it was an interesting idea and could still be something cool). Around that same time, I was slated to join a team working on a digital multimedia diary at the start of 2004. Turns out, just before I joined the team, at an ex-officio meeting I attended in late 2003, they chose to name the product Lifeblog, forcing all of us to jump into blogging (and retconning blogging features into the product, haha).
From 1.0 to 2.0
I’d already been online for many years. I had used various sorts of bulletin boards and forums to post stuff and engage with folks. I had jointly run a proto-blog for a company (mostly news, analysis, and commentary in reverse chronological order – but no comments or permalink or feeds). And I had a few pages for family updates on Geocities (Athens 1066 was the main one). This was during the roaring 1999-2001.
Yet, blogging was different. Blogging took various nice elements from being online and gave online writing key features to help build engagement and ease of publishing. Not to mention, there were some hosted services, such as TypePad (where this blog got started at cognections.typepad.com) and Blogger (purchased by Google in 2003), hosted service that became THE thing in 2004 (blogging was a regular cover story in 2005).
Back in the day, a Tuesday, to be precise
Because our Lifeblog product was about blogging, we had to dive into the world of bloggers and blogging. As far as I know, our team was the first at Nokia to talk about our products and to engage with bloggers to earn goodwill for a product launch. Over 2004 and 2005 I did a lot of traveling and speaking and posting about blogging and mobiles.
Fast forward to end of 2007, Nokia corporate comms brought me on to build and run the Nokia corporate blog, which we called Nokia Conversations. This was not the first Nokia corporate blog. The first one was the S60 blog, set up by Phil Schwarzmann, who followed me after I had left the S60 team. I was a sorta godparent to the blogs he set up and ran. Of course, I turned to Phil to replace me when I left Nokia and the Nokia Conversations team.
Why didn’t the Nokia Lifeblog team have a blog? Well, individually, some of us did, and we talked about what we did, our products, and such. But blogging was so new. As I recall, someone told my boss ‘We don’t make celebrities at Nokia.’ Really, none of us wanted to be a celebrity blogger riding on the Nokia brand. We just wanted to promote our products. Tho that led to the other rub – the whole blogging about our product seemed so contrary to how Nokia had been marketing all their products.
So in the end, the team that finally brought blogging to Nokia was sorta not allowed to actually have one.
By the time Phil set up the S60 blogs, things were more accepted, and marketing teams were more experimental. By the time I got back into the game, Nokia Conversations was able to go big, be experimental, drive huge changes in Nokia comms, and do it while having fun (thanks to a forgiving and creative leadership).
Still here
This blog started on cognections.typepad.com, by my records, in mid-January 2004 (on a Tuesday, actually). I moved the domain to Molecularist.com, I think around 2008/09, just before my move to the US.
I was a heavy blogger in the day. And I’ve had the good fortune to have various jobs where blogging was part of the role. No more so than Nokia Conversations, of course, but also at Children’s Boston (more videos and Facebook than traditional text blogging), IBM, Owl. Indeed, posting something online is always my go to move at any org I’m at.
But, as I saw way back in 2005, social media morselized the web – fragmenting where people ended up, spreading convos across (off the top of my head) Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, and of course Twitter, not to motion so many other places people post stuff, such as Yelp, Amazon, Wattpad, and all the ones that have died in the past 15 years (looking at you Flickr).
And folks follow the conversations. So, for me, this blog became less of an outlet, especially as feed readers and the like died down, I lost contact with so many I knew back in 2005-2009, and everyone moved to mostly Twitter. I usually end up having spurts here when there are no other places for me to write things down, or when I have a brainwave and just need to write it down.
You know the line ‘dance like no one is watching.’ Blogging to me these days is just like that. The things in 2005-2009 that made blogs hum with activity are no longer around or widely used. So I don’t give a damn and ‘blog like there’s no one watching.’
Social media is dead, long live social media
What struck me from reading the article I link to above, is that these past few weeks I’ve been reviewing my online presence, like I do every end of year. I had soured on Twitter so long ago, but in the past few years, I heavily curated my Twitter feed, focusing on makers and the like. Tho in the past few months, I basically shut off the spigot on all my online and offline feeds, narrowed down to two websites and a print magazine. I occasionally hit Discord for two communities, mostly to troubleshoot electronics things I’m working on. And I use LinkedIn for work.
But, for sure, this blog, the one that predated all of the others, is still limping along.
I know what it takes to grow a blog, and not sure that’s the path I want to take. Growing a blog is hard work, like any channel. I’ll leave that to someone who wants to pay me. Haha.
I’ll be content with posting something once in a while for now, mostly for me, not working hard on changing things up.
And if you happen to be one of the rare person who is actually reading this, let me know. Perhaps that will encourage me to write more.
What do you think of the Verge article? Do you blog? When did you start? Why do you blog?
[BTW, just saw this right after I pushed the publish button. Russ Beattie, a compulsive blogger for many years, also commented on the return of lifelong blogging and his own path from blogging for a living to tweeting and back to blogging. Hm, wishful thinking or a real trend?]
Image by Nile from Pixabay
Yup. Still here, reading and writing blogs ☺️