I have exactly one IRL friend that cares about my technology stuff, but he lives far away and we don't see each other in person too often. My ex tolerates me talking about it a little bit before he tells me to shut up, but that's it. It kind of sucks. I've just re-internalized to that nothing I do really matters, and therefore neither do I.
I assume nobody reads my blog, at most a couple people check out the pretty pictures but that's about it.
My opinion on blogging is do it for yourself, not to achieve something. That way it doesn't feel like wasted effort when nobody reads it and it can still be fun or cathartic to write.
That’s not necessarily negative. I’ll sometimes say that to myself when I’m feeling down as a way of freeing myself from whatever thoughts are feeling too heavy. I’m not really into stoicism, but I think it’s what memento mori is getting at.
I love when friends do this. It's hard to keep up with people and what they're up to. Publishing and letting people subscribe to me is a great way to share things. A few examples of some friends who are doing this:
Justin Searls (fairly known in Ruby and Rails community) mostly quit a lot of various social channels though publishes on some of them one direction. He started a podcast that wasn't meant to be guests of some specific topic, it's just him updating you on things. What he's working on, what he's learning, random stories, etc. - https://justin.searls.co/casts/
Brandur who I've worked with at a couple of places (Heroku previously, and now Crunchy Data) who writes great technical pieces that often end up here also has more of a personal newsletter. While there are technical pieces in there at times he'll also talk about personal experiences my favorite one is some of the unique experiences hiking the Pacific Trail (https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails).
This gives me heart. I like writing about technical things, but I also like writing about personal things, concerts I went to, whatever. I'm a whole person, and I never liked the pressure (mostly from social media) to build your "brand" around one genre or style of writing. For me, my site is a personal one where I post about things I'm interested in. Ham radio, machine learning, my travels, pay phones, whatever. Maybe less useful for a reader or audience building but...I just like to write and share things.
Huh, kinda funny, I feel the exact same way. Few people IRL know about my website, 2-3 people occasionally write in a year about something, but weirdly it feels like the idea of a personal, non commoditized internet space has become so rare it's seen as odd.
A good enough personal brand means you have a name (generally) disconnected from your individual job and you are known as an entity in your own right, often not entirely pinned to a single discipline. The most cynical example here is probably Kylie Kardashian, ostensibly a billionaire entrepreneur, but you could just as easily sub in a lot of modern content creators like Mr. Beast.
These can come about naturally through some amount of fame, naturally through having a natural talent for something that generates interest in you and your opinions, or you can grind for it in a kind of numbers game.
If you are working towards getting your name "out there" and having some of that sense of recognition, if you're hustling for subscribers or follows, if you are following trends to post about in order to try to get more readers, you're behaving in brand-building exercises.
If you're just writing for the sake of writing, or to keep a journal for your future self, or just so your close friends can keep up with you, you're not.
Wanting attention and for other people to remember you with the purpose of getting ahead later on, by getting favors from the audience, selling things to the audience, etc. Commonly done back in the day to later send traffic to whatever SaaS you'd try to start.
You will get an audience (if any) that fits the topics. If you want to have more readers you will have to increasingly include things they would like and exclude things they don't like.
In reality an interesting topic is one where the answers are unknown. You might be biased or super objective, you might carefully compare theories and evidence on both sides or perspectives of an argument or theory. At some point you will have the tendency to include what YOU think about it. It doesn't matter what that is, you will lose readers.
Perhaps you welcome Jesus in your life or reject him. One could switch between those two every other week and if that is what is on ones mind one should just talk about it. Talk about it often enough and you will build an audience of similar doubt while some Christians and atheist won't stick around.
For those with more patience or sufficiently impressed with your other writings you need only repeat the "offense" often enough.
Surely a thoughtful person should have an opinion about every empire, corporation or ideology murdering, maiming or torturing people? If you are completely indifferent about it, that would be your opinion.
Disclose your opinion and those who don't agree wont be amused. You have to actively avoid the topic which isn't easy as everything in the universe is connected.
You can be Steve Jobs, that doesn't mean you can just talk about alternative medicine. Facts have nothing to do with it.
I can write cookie cutter stuff that everyone can read (perhaps even enjoy!) but my private thoughts gravitate straight towards the controversy and I ponder those things deeply, sometimes for decades. If I mistakenly write those thoughts down Best I can hope for is an audience of anger. If you talk about something it means you must believe in it.
Someone on twitter just asked what the rope hanging from the American flag is. I got a 12 hour ban for saying "I dunno, it seems enough rope to hang yourself?"
That is your free speech absolutism sandwich all bagged up for ya. ha-ha
>Can you tell me the difference between building a brand and this guy ?
I think it's about intent. Everyone builds a brand to a degree just by being themselves online, but some people do it with an intent to capitalize on it and it often come through in their work in a way that can be distasteful.
Ah, Lars-Christian! No one wants to talk to you in real life about your blog because you're in Norway. If you lived here in the United States, you'd have a perpetual string of very interesting conversations about your personal website because Americans are all about technology and hearing how any of us peons are fighting the power, man.
At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.
You apparently have no idea about Norway. Norway was the very first internet country, because of its vast coastline and enormous distances. Schoolkids had internet remote classrooms since the 90ies.
Everybody there is online, and blogs are widely read. Much more than in the US.
I haven't been on traditional social media for about 6 years and so the way people keep up with me is via my blog. This way they get an update maybe once a month about what it is I've been doing/thinking about, then they reach out to me via email.
Even the IRL people know I have a blog, but I guess it kinda comes up since I also run a blogging platform.
Earlier in my career, every single person in my team had a website. At lunch we would talk about how we built it, servers, fail2ban, zipbomb, etc.
Many years later, one coworker has a website under construction, and others say they have nothing to say online. When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product.
But hey, I'm happy to write in the dark. Especially after some of my posts have literally landed me on TV. I felt like everything I Wrote after was scrutinized. But the world has forgotten about me so I'm free again.
> When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product.
Influencing killed it. Nowadays people bring up their online presence when they want views, impressions, and subscriptions, when they are trying to bump follower count.
The thing about irl blogs is how, if it's tech related, then it kinda follows you. So there's a pressure to keep things corporate to not scare away job opportunities.
There's a reason why LinkedIn reads like garbage, and even if it's obvious, people neither point it out or stop.
I'm personally less averse to calling that stuff out these days because I found that I wasn't exactly getting job opportunities in the current market by playing it safe. Since being quiet and uncontroversial doesn't even work, what's the point? I think people are making a mistake by not saying what they actually think.
The only reason I don't have a blog yet is inertia/laziness. It'll happen eventually.
It’s funny how different lives can be. I’ve never been part of the corporate world, been self employed basically my whole working life and my blog is not even a thought when it comes to work. I’d honestly be super happy if someone I interact with for work asked me about something I wrote because I write about things I care about and I’m always happy to chat with people.
> I’d honestly be super happy if someone I interact with for work asked me about something I wrote
As a student (who also has no corporate experience), I share this feeling. The few times I've been asked by other students about my blog, I've always been excited (perhaps a little too much) to share my thoughts and opinions in a conservation.
I’ve had this fear a few times - and when my last workplace started getting a bit weird (layoffs) I largely stopped publishing much of anything. I experimented with publishing under an alternate identity a bit, but it never stuck.
Now I’m working through my backlog of drafts, dumping a load of stuff ASAP, and then trying to commit myself to some form of publishing schedule to force myself to “catch up” on the project backlog.
I am using a pseudonym on my blog and I tend to use a different pseudonym on all websites/services/medias I use. I have often pondered wether I should just publish under my own name or not. The thing is once you do that, there is no going back and I have never felt ready for that.
I know it puts off some people who mistake that for anonymity and think this is ruining the web, that people can't behave if they aren't talking under their own name, I respect that.
I am not looking for anonymity. I don't pretend to hide from authorities. However pseudonimity allows me to express myself while not engaging my current or future employers directly.
> I know it puts off some people who mistake that for anonymity and think this is ruining the web
Its interesting that we got to a point where anyone would consider anonymity to be ruining the web.
When I was growing up in the 90s and early 00s anonymity online was the whole point. Everything online was behind usernames, and usernames weren't expected to be connected to your real identity at all.
Thank you Facebook, you did a wonderdul job of convincing an entire generation that they should put their real name, profile photo, hometown, etc online and tied to everything they say online.
When I was growing up in the 90s and early 00s anonymity online was the whole point. Everything online was behind usernames, and usernames weren't expected to be connected to your real identity at all.
You consider that the norm because that's what you grew up with.
Before then, people would sign everything on the internet (and its predecessor networks) with their real names, work/home addresses, phone numbers, and more.
That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.
.. and when Usenet appeared people commented in tech newsgroups with their realnames and a good number of them also posted in alt newsgroups under nom de guerres.
>That's your local account, not information that is visible to anyone outside of your network.
There are a lot of unix tools to ask networks to query that information and they'll happily do it for other unix systems they connect to. When I was in college in the last 90s, I'd often lookup phone numbers and such of students at other universities using command line unix utilities.
Like what? I'm not familiar with any daemons that expose this info on a network interface. Maybe identd? AFAIK that can expose the username, none of the other fields, but is typically set to an alternate identifier.
Or do you mean shared mainframes with many users on the same system? That'd still be local to the system, you just happened to have access to that system.
Are you sure you're not just thinking of ldap/directory lookups?
Finger is one that was commonly available on university unix systems. You could do finger username@node.domain, and the username was often their email address or some common shortening of their name.
Sure, that is the timeframe I grew up with so there is bias there. It also happens to be when the internet was starting be used more broadly.
Correct me if I'm wrong here because it is before my time, but prior to WWW wasn't the common use for the internet government and academic research, and technical communications of those actually building the internet protocols? Unless I'm wrong there, I just wouldn't really lump that in when comparing how the average person uses the internet.
Mainly academic and military and spouses and family, yes.
FWiW shitposting on UseNet started very early on - binary porn coming from German airbases was a thing and while many official things were sent from @MyRealName there were plenty of handles used and an0n postings.
Inside the US, we all were given historical precedents for anonymous speech. While the Declaration of Independence was signed, most of the leaflets arguing for independence were anonymous.
Or, consider Publius as the author of the Federalist papers, a pseudonym for Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay.
> I know it puts off some people who mistake that for anonymity and think this is ruining the web, that people can't behave if they aren't talking under their own name
I haven't run across this sentiment with regard to personal websites or blogs. Who is saying that?
I do see it for forums, comment sections, and social media. Those often bring together people who did not consciously seek to interact with each other, and do tend to reward antisocial behavior with attention.
Pseudonyms are nice too because they are, for all practical purposes, identities, just not real life identities. You can build a brand around a pseudonym, even if you can't necessarily convert that to real life cachet. That is somewhat different from pure anonymity, because if you act like a dick eventually no one will take you seriously and you'll lose something of value, even if that value is just the goodwill of your readers.
I have a blog that has all my book reviews that I've written over the past ~17 years. It's got over 1000 reviews on it.
I post them all to Goodreads as well. Hardly anyone read them on my own blog.
It's convenient for me to have them all in one spot so I can export them and whatnot.
I've had one review that a successful blogger (now substacker) linked to and that probably resulted in more than half the hits the blog ever got coming in about two weeks.
Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. My reviews get some reaction a few times a week there.
A few people IRL know about my blog and reviews on Goodreads. I don't generally tell people about it but if people really read and it comes up I tell people.
I keep it largely separate from my Twitter account and Linked In profile.
> Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more.
Yeah because reviews there are put into context of other reviews. I never google for book reviews, because I expect mostly spam. I always go directly to goodreads or amazon.
I showed my Mom my personal website a few years ago, and her only comment was it needed more pictures, so I added a picture of a window plant to exactly one page. I haven't showed it to anyone else IRL.
Dude is right, no one except for the audience cares.
I was a successful blogger in the 00th years and with a side business around Made for Adsense because once you understood SEO it was inevitable, if this rings a bell.
Reading a blog seems magical. Just imagine “Do ppl IRL my print magazine?” to use another metaphor. Nope and yes. Same goes for artists, say singer and songwriters: “Do you listen to my stuff?” Why should they?
Understanding your readers and fans is not easy. Statistically speaking, if all your close friends read your blog, you either are on to something or you get lied to.
So if all around read your blog you might be some truly impressive author with a huge fan base - and 99,9999% won’t fit in here.
As a side note, I still know quite a fraction of successful YouTubers. They are publishers, content creators. It is work for them, maybe evolved from something they did for fun. These dudes always prioritize money now - because they know their niche a bit better now and want to appeal to it.
I had removed Analytics from my website/blog quite a while back and I don't know who read, or what happens to my website anymore. It is a pleasure not knowing. Cloudflare does do the basic Analytics that comes built-in and I rarely see them.
During the early days of Blogging (I meant the early 2000s), when we met up in person during conferences, we talked a lot about blog posts, etc. I once let one of my cousins tag along as I spoke at a conference organized by Macromedia. I did the usual thing with others there, talking about blogs. When we returned home, my cousin said, “You are kind of a deal. People know you by your blog - brajeshwar.com.”
I’ve been lucky to have been recognized by a few people in the wild (IRL) who walked up to me and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com?”
These days, I just write for myself.
Fast forward 15+ years, my daughter somehow decided to search the Internet for me, and she said, “You are like a ChatGPT-powered Discord bot, answering questions on an antique Reddit forum.”
Actually producing value is so last millennium. Ok boomer, you add value. We don't do that here. Unless you make TikToks endlessly aspiring to be a societal net loss kardashian, why are you even breathing? Writing text? Can't the computer just do that, somehow?
The point of the article is one I align with: You're writing it for yourself, 99% of the time. The other 1% is the future you.
I blog for work. I don't discuss it with family. I think I'd find it very stressful answering the "why did you say that" questions.
The corollary of this, is that I write notes by hand in almost every meeting I attend, and never ever read them again -But for things like IETF I do a mixture of .org and meetecho (markdown) because there is at least some possibility others may get value from the shared log in meetecho, and I know I will use the .org to .. write the blog.
In the past I’ve used a blog literally to make small notes on very simple things that I always ended up having to look up, or for notes on the “right way” to do something.
For example: for years I was using Pythons requests library incorrectly. The way I was doing it worked - but it wasn’t correct.
Once I published a short blog on the correct way - the correct way seemed to stick better in my mind!
Kind of, idk if you can call it that. Git frontends like gitea already have markdown rendering so idk what the point is of having a separate thing for blog writing
I take many handwritten notes throughout the day like you, but found that reviewing them for 2 minutes at the start of the next day has high return on investment.
It occasionally comes up in conversations. But I don't think people are that interested. Although I will say my programming hot takes occasionally do get popular.
The thing I find most interesting, every time something like this gets posted here on HN is that in the comments, depending on the day, dozen or hundreds or even thousand of people post some permutation of "hey, I feel the same"
And that makes me smile because on the one hand people keep repeating that blogs are dead, but on the other you're all proof that it's clearly not the case.
A website is a Presentation of Self extended to artwork and 2D media.
What is a Presentation of Self? It comes the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman.
The two primary senses of humans are sight and vision. If you take the time to write down and enumerate the ways by which people understand the internal state of others, you realize that a computer simply communicates impressions of people over long distances, some of which have limited correspondence with who a person really is. Photos could be fake. Videos could be scripted and a certain impression. You don't really see someone for who they are except in real life, talking to them for a duration.
Most people talk to or avoid certain people internally based on how they act and what they say. But once you realize the structure of communication, you feel like a robot talking to others. What was implicit becomes explicit.
So yes, a website matters, if the increasing trends for humans and human ability are greater knowledge consumption, production, network communication over locality, and so on. It reveals your internal perception, taste, intelligence, and processing of information, by which people use to judge you and ask how relation to you improves the group fitness.
Having a website selects for intellectualism. Social media is also a presentation. The question could be rephrased: Do people know you have a TikTok or Instagram?
People such as his wife and digital people have increasingly different lifestyles and diverge. Had the author made his way to a metropole or more major place, it's likely having a personal brand would've mattered more.
I kinda get it, but the opening paragraphs betray the author's problematic, arrogant attitude --- passive-aggressively complaining about his wife for not appreciating the grand genius of his blog. My wife, my parents, my friends etc are all aware of my website. My wife enthusiastically shows my website to our friends. I have a blog post about food recommendations that is very popular with my friends.
An alternative interpretation (and the way in which I read it) was that the author is incredibly passionate about something mundane and his wife is very obviously not interested anywhere near as much or at all, just like everyone else who likely stumbles across his blog. I don't think it was attempting to show disdain but acceptance, admitting that he builds a blog because he cares about it alone; even his wife doesn't read it.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke... I've been wanting to read that too! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell has been one of my favorite and most immersive books, absolutely brilliant!
Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/
Lars-Christian, your site got a little attention today :-)
No post I’ve written has ever gone viral.
I also have a personal website. If anyone notice what I've written it's a very nice added bonus. For me it's also about personal ownership of my content, and perhaps also a reminder to myself of the old internet - which I miss.
Yes, because my blog is basically a collection of things people have asked me more than once.
* How do I rent a motorcycle in Taiwan?
* What's a coding bootcamp like?
* What's your emacs config?
* Got any book recommendations?
* You got into Raw? How was it?
* Didn't you parents come to Taiwan? Mine are coming next month, what did you do with them?
etc. I'm constantly dropping links to people at networking events or when they come into my restaurant. I also just forget things constantly and so my blog is basically my external brain.
Some do, mostly when the problem they are trying to solve is somewhere in my blog past. I've learned over the years not to advertise the blog/page, due to weird questions I get, for example: Q: How costly is this? (A: it's free, minus my time), Q: Why is it so ugly? (A: When you write your perfect jekyll skin, I will use it, you know it's about my future self searching for the info, not about beauty), Q: Why? (A: I always find something interesting to read in my blog, unlike your corporate page). p.s. The long-tail effect has been predicted at least 20 years ago, so I understand that views will be low or none: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
130 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadHope you find some more things that bring joy.
(I know platitudes are grating, but I thought you might want to know someone is rooting for you.)
My opinion on blogging is do it for yourself, not to achieve something. That way it doesn't feel like wasted effort when nobody reads it and it can still be fun or cathartic to write.
That’s not necessarily negative. I’ll sometimes say that to myself when I’m feeling down as a way of freeing myself from whatever thoughts are feeling too heavy. I’m not really into stoicism, but I think it’s what memento mori is getting at.
Justin Searls (fairly known in Ruby and Rails community) mostly quit a lot of various social channels though publishes on some of them one direction. He started a podcast that wasn't meant to be guests of some specific topic, it's just him updating you on things. What he's working on, what he's learning, random stories, etc. - https://justin.searls.co/casts/
Brandur who I've worked with at a couple of places (Heroku previously, and now Crunchy Data) who writes great technical pieces that often end up here also has more of a personal newsletter. While there are technical pieces in there at times he'll also talk about personal experiences my favorite one is some of the unique experiences hiking the Pacific Trail (https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails).
I like this guy is doing his own thing.
I struggle to understand what this means, as I dont know what "building a brand" means when a person does it.
These can come about naturally through some amount of fame, naturally through having a natural talent for something that generates interest in you and your opinions, or you can grind for it in a kind of numbers game.
If you are working towards getting your name "out there" and having some of that sense of recognition, if you're hustling for subscribers or follows, if you are following trends to post about in order to try to get more readers, you're behaving in brand-building exercises.
If you're just writing for the sake of writing, or to keep a journal for your future self, or just so your close friends can keep up with you, you're not.
In reality an interesting topic is one where the answers are unknown. You might be biased or super objective, you might carefully compare theories and evidence on both sides or perspectives of an argument or theory. At some point you will have the tendency to include what YOU think about it. It doesn't matter what that is, you will lose readers.
Perhaps you welcome Jesus in your life or reject him. One could switch between those two every other week and if that is what is on ones mind one should just talk about it. Talk about it often enough and you will build an audience of similar doubt while some Christians and atheist won't stick around.
For those with more patience or sufficiently impressed with your other writings you need only repeat the "offense" often enough.
Surely a thoughtful person should have an opinion about every empire, corporation or ideology murdering, maiming or torturing people? If you are completely indifferent about it, that would be your opinion.
Disclose your opinion and those who don't agree wont be amused. You have to actively avoid the topic which isn't easy as everything in the universe is connected.
You can be Steve Jobs, that doesn't mean you can just talk about alternative medicine. Facts have nothing to do with it.
I can write cookie cutter stuff that everyone can read (perhaps even enjoy!) but my private thoughts gravitate straight towards the controversy and I ponder those things deeply, sometimes for decades. If I mistakenly write those thoughts down Best I can hope for is an audience of anger. If you talk about something it means you must believe in it.
Someone on twitter just asked what the rope hanging from the American flag is. I got a 12 hour ban for saying "I dunno, it seems enough rope to hang yourself?"
That is your free speech absolutism sandwich all bagged up for ya. ha-ha
I think it's about intent. Everyone builds a brand to a degree just by being themselves online, but some people do it with an intent to capitalize on it and it often come through in their work in a way that can be distasteful.
At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.
Everybody there is online, and blogs are widely read. Much more than in the US.
Even the IRL people know I have a blog, but I guess it kinda comes up since I also run a blogging platform.
Many years later, one coworker has a website under construction, and others say they have nothing to say online. When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product.
But hey, I'm happy to write in the dark. Especially after some of my posts have literally landed me on TV. I felt like everything I Wrote after was scrutinized. But the world has forgotten about me so I'm free again.
Influencing killed it. Nowadays people bring up their online presence when they want views, impressions, and subscriptions, when they are trying to bump follower count.
There's a reason why LinkedIn reads like garbage, and even if it's obvious, people neither point it out or stop.
The only reason I don't have a blog yet is inertia/laziness. It'll happen eventually.
As a student (who also has no corporate experience), I share this feeling. The few times I've been asked by other students about my blog, I've always been excited (perhaps a little too much) to share my thoughts and opinions in a conservation.
My address is on my profile here on HN
Now I’m working through my backlog of drafts, dumping a load of stuff ASAP, and then trying to commit myself to some form of publishing schedule to force myself to “catch up” on the project backlog.
I know it puts off some people who mistake that for anonymity and think this is ruining the web, that people can't behave if they aren't talking under their own name, I respect that.
I am not looking for anonymity. I don't pretend to hide from authorities. However pseudonimity allows me to express myself while not engaging my current or future employers directly.
Its interesting that we got to a point where anyone would consider anonymity to be ruining the web.
When I was growing up in the 90s and early 00s anonymity online was the whole point. Everything online was behind usernames, and usernames weren't expected to be connected to your real identity at all.
Thank you Facebook, you did a wonderdul job of convincing an entire generation that they should put their real name, profile photo, hometown, etc online and tied to everything they say online.
You consider that the norm because that's what you grew up with.
Before then, people would sign everything on the internet (and its predecessor networks) with their real names, work/home addresses, phone numbers, and more.
That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.
That was the early 1980s as I recall them.
> That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.
That's your local account, not information that is visible to anyone outside of your network.
There are a lot of unix tools to ask networks to query that information and they'll happily do it for other unix systems they connect to. When I was in college in the last 90s, I'd often lookup phone numbers and such of students at other universities using command line unix utilities.
Or do you mean shared mainframes with many users on the same system? That'd still be local to the system, you just happened to have access to that system.
Are you sure you're not just thinking of ldap/directory lookups?
Correct me if I'm wrong here because it is before my time, but prior to WWW wasn't the common use for the internet government and academic research, and technical communications of those actually building the internet protocols? Unless I'm wrong there, I just wouldn't really lump that in when comparing how the average person uses the internet.
FWiW shitposting on UseNet started very early on - binary porn coming from German airbases was a thing and while many official things were sent from @MyRealName there were plenty of handles used and an0n postings.
Or, consider Publius as the author of the Federalist papers, a pseudonym for Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay.
I haven't run across this sentiment with regard to personal websites or blogs. Who is saying that?
I do see it for forums, comment sections, and social media. Those often bring together people who did not consciously seek to interact with each other, and do tend to reward antisocial behavior with attention.
I post them all to Goodreads as well. Hardly anyone read them on my own blog.
It's convenient for me to have them all in one spot so I can export them and whatnot.
I've had one review that a successful blogger (now substacker) linked to and that probably resulted in more than half the hits the blog ever got coming in about two weeks.
Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. My reviews get some reaction a few times a week there.
A few people IRL know about my blog and reviews on Goodreads. I don't generally tell people about it but if people really read and it comes up I tell people.
I keep it largely separate from my Twitter account and Linked In profile.
Yeah because reviews there are put into context of other reviews. I never google for book reviews, because I expect mostly spam. I always go directly to goodreads or amazon.
https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html
I was a successful blogger in the 00th years and with a side business around Made for Adsense because once you understood SEO it was inevitable, if this rings a bell.
Reading a blog seems magical. Just imagine “Do ppl IRL my print magazine?” to use another metaphor. Nope and yes. Same goes for artists, say singer and songwriters: “Do you listen to my stuff?” Why should they?
Understanding your readers and fans is not easy. Statistically speaking, if all your close friends read your blog, you either are on to something or you get lied to.
So if all around read your blog you might be some truly impressive author with a huge fan base - and 99,9999% won’t fit in here.
As a side note, I still know quite a fraction of successful YouTubers. They are publishers, content creators. It is work for them, maybe evolved from something they did for fun. These dudes always prioritize money now - because they know their niche a bit better now and want to appeal to it.
[1]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/20/measuring-blog-success/
I’ve been lucky to have been recognized by a few people in the wild (IRL) who walked up to me and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com?”
These days, I just write for myself.
Fast forward 15+ years, my daughter somehow decided to search the Internet for me, and she said, “You are like a ChatGPT-powered Discord bot, answering questions on an antique Reddit forum.”
https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1630852614303924224
Now people talk about high engagement twitter threads, linked-in posts or just film each other filming each other for their "content".
Reading this term hit my brain with such a sudden wave of nostalgia. It really was a different time.
https://kenhv.com/blog
I blog for work. I don't discuss it with family. I think I'd find it very stressful answering the "why did you say that" questions.
The corollary of this, is that I write notes by hand in almost every meeting I attend, and never ever read them again -But for things like IETF I do a mixture of .org and meetecho (markdown) because there is at least some possibility others may get value from the shared log in meetecho, and I know I will use the .org to .. write the blog.
Or alternatively it could be a place for educational stuff like the more detailed answers on stackoverflow. Except the middleman gets removed
For example: for years I was using Pythons requests library incorrectly. The way I was doing it worked - but it wasn’t correct.
Once I published a short blog on the correct way - the correct way seemed to stick better in my mind!
Usually I prefer a git repo for this kind of thing
And that makes me smile because on the one hand people keep repeating that blogs are dead, but on the other you're all proof that it's clearly not the case.
What is a Presentation of Self? It comes the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman.
The two primary senses of humans are sight and vision. If you take the time to write down and enumerate the ways by which people understand the internal state of others, you realize that a computer simply communicates impressions of people over long distances, some of which have limited correspondence with who a person really is. Photos could be fake. Videos could be scripted and a certain impression. You don't really see someone for who they are except in real life, talking to them for a duration.
Most people talk to or avoid certain people internally based on how they act and what they say. But once you realize the structure of communication, you feel like a robot talking to others. What was implicit becomes explicit.
So yes, a website matters, if the increasing trends for humans and human ability are greater knowledge consumption, production, network communication over locality, and so on. It reveals your internal perception, taste, intelligence, and processing of information, by which people use to judge you and ask how relation to you improves the group fitness.
Having a website selects for intellectualism. Social media is also a presentation. The question could be rephrased: Do people know you have a TikTok or Instagram?
People such as his wife and digital people have increasingly different lifestyles and diverge. Had the author made his way to a metropole or more major place, it's likely having a personal brand would've mattered more.
Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/
No post I’ve written has ever gone viral.
I also have a personal website. If anyone notice what I've written it's a very nice added bonus. For me it's also about personal ownership of my content, and perhaps also a reminder to myself of the old internet - which I miss.
* How do I rent a motorcycle in Taiwan?
* What's a coding bootcamp like?
* What's your emacs config?
* Got any book recommendations?
* You got into Raw? How was it?
* Didn't you parents come to Taiwan? Mine are coming next month, what did you do with them?
etc. I'm constantly dropping links to people at networking events or when they come into my restaurant. I also just forget things constantly and so my blog is basically my external brain.
Most of them don’t care for the topics I write about. However, they usually get a little excited, as if they found a real-life Easter egg.
My blog: https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/