Someone messaged me yesterday morning, and asked me what seems like a totally straightforward question: why do you have a blog?
The context of the question was a response to a LinkedIn post where I described some Saturday experiments in syndication. Following the POSSE practice of ‘Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere,’ for the past fifteen years or so I’ve had a blog in some form or another as my primary way of communicating with the outside world.
I’ve always been a believer in owning your own plot of land online. I’m old enough to remember the good ol’ days of the internet, back when you could register a geocities website for free, publish whatever you liked, and offend as many eyeballs as possible with gloriously unaesthetic websites cobbled together from scraps of HTML and way too much <blink> tag.
As soon as I got access to a desktop PC at home, I started collecting websites like I collect everything else (rocks, plectrums, fountain pens…): obsessively. Even now, I have maybe two or three dozen domains (you lose track), most of which are sitting there .
These days, I stick to blogging more than building actual websites. My HTML chops have long rusted off, and I prefer writing words to code. But lately I have been feeling nostalgic for the internet of my youth, and that simple question ‘Why do you have a blog?’ really hammered the point home for me.
A little plot of land
Recently, I published a post where I described the ‘dead internet’ theory, and the ways in which big tech companies have walled off huge parts of the internet. As technologist Tom Eastman said, the internet these days is basically, “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”. As an excellent example of why this is a problem, it’s no longer possible to track down the original citation for that quote since it was posted on Twitter, and Eastman no longer has an active account there (you can find him on Mastodon though).
In that post, I referenced Molly White’s excellent article We Can Have a Different Web, where she used the analogy of the internet as a vast and open plot of land that has been divided up and made hostile by platforms. But White also speaks of the alternative, and I think it’s worth quoting the article again to show the potential future, and not just the disappointing present of the internet:
If we wanted, each of us could escape those walls and set up our own spaces within the limitless, fertile soil beyond. Some of us might opt to leave those walls permanently, while others might choose to split our time between our beautiful, messy, free world outside to maintain smaller, meticulously-groomed simulacrums within the enclosures that hint — without angering our landlords — at the creations beyond. We can periodically smuggle seeds and plant cuttings beyond the walls, ensuring that if the proprietors decide to evict us, our gardens will live on.
This blog, and the others I’ve had over the years (my first major one was a baking blog that still exists, though I don’t maintain it because I don’t bake as much these days) are set up in that fertile ground beyond the walls of whatever-social-media-platform-is-cool-these-days.
Own your own space
I think it’s incredibly important, now more than ever, that writers, creators, and really anyone with an online identity (which is everyone) have space to call their own online. It’s still possible to do that for free, or at a very low cost. You can sign up for a WordPress website for nothing, as long as you don’t mind being at whatever.wordpress.com. For those people willing to spend a few dollars on a domain, you can get yournamehere.com, or something similar.
And the reason that’s important has been demonstrated with painful clarity by other platforms in the past few years. I speak to so many educators and authors who built a huge following on Twitter, only to watch it morph into X and descend into chaos. I have seen people put all of their eggs into Facebook’s basket, only to be horrified when Meta AI started to insinuate itself into private groups uninvited, offering “helpful” summaries and even joining in on conversation threads.
If you own your own space, you can decide what happens there. For example, I have very aggressive comment moderation, which just this year has filtered over 50,000 spam comments from my posts. I have zero interest in an “AI assistant” lurking around my articles, so I don’t install that feature. And when the social media platforms of today go belly-up (and they will, because they always do eventually), I’ll still be hanging out at It’sJustMyName.com.
You can have it all
And guess what, I still use social media. Because you don’t have to be a weird internet hermit to enjoy the benefits of owning your own space. My main platform, next to this blog, is LinkedIn. I never used Twitter much, but I cancelled my account there and moved to BlueSky along with several million others. Recently, I’ve started to explore Mastodon and the “fediverse”: an effort to recreate some of that nostalgic early internet by allowing people to – shock and horror – post things online without being surveilled, cornered, shadowbanned, and digitally hung, drawn, and quartered at the whims of whatever company owns the platform.
My experiments this morning over coffee revolved around syndication: how do I really make the most of this blog as a central place on the internet, but still allow people to meet the content wherever they are?
After a couple of failed attempts (mostly due to restricted platforms, a lack of interoperability, or a deliberate effort by some platforms to obfuscate sharing) I have a pretty decent setup.
Now, whenever I write a post like this one, I can hit publish and within a minute or two have:
- A LinkedIn post that shares the article
- A BlueSky post within the 300 character limit
- The Fediverse instance of this blog, which automatically lets anyone access the whole thing from whatever platform they like (e.g., Mastodon)
- A Substack post
- A Medium post
- An RSS feed update emailed out to people who subscribe
If I wanted to, I could add Facebook, Threads, Instagram, X, and half a dozen other platforms into the mix, but there’s no point yelling into the void if I never plan on visiting.
Anyone who prefers to use Substack as their main way to read content can now find my articles there. Ditto Medium. If you’d prefer to use Mastodon over LinkedIn to follow trends and hashtags, you do you. I’ll be posting wherever you are. Not in a creepy way…
Follow this blog on the Fediverse or share this article wherever you like:
Online publishing and AI
My last thought in answering the question ‘Why do you have a blog?’ (it took a long time to answer) is how it relates to GenAI, my usual topic. First of all, I’ve written extensively about how I do and don’t use AI in the writing process, so I won’t go over that again.
But AI has huge implications for anyone creating content online. At the moment, around 25% of my website traffic comes from search results, and 95% of that is Google search. Google has gone all-in on eating itself with “AI Mode”. I expect that the significant number of visits I receive via search queries will reduce once Google finds a way to reliably monetise the feature and roll it out globally.
If people search for “AI policies in Australia” right now, they’ll likely find my website. Once AI Mode is enabled, they’ll just get an amalgam of my website and a few others, and maybe a few footnote citations that, let’s face it, no one will ever click.
Meanwhile, content farms are filling the internet with AI-generated garbage, and equally impacting on search rankings and discovery.
But despite all that, the internet itself hasn’t gone anywhere. Despite all the bots, the AI slop farms, and the determined efforts of social media platforms like LinkedIn to destroy communication as they suppress posts and flood comments with synthetic idiocy, the good ol’ days of the internet might actually be right now.
For example, in at least four out of my last five posts I’ve used AI to write snippets of code to make the articles more interactive, or to illustrate points more clearly, or to embed content from other sites.
In learning how to connect this blog to Substack and Medium, I used AI to write some very simple JavaScript that made the process easier.
And when going down the fediverse rabbit hole, I used ChatGPT to answer weird questions about the ActivityPub protocol, and to convince me that I didn’t need to rush off and spin up my own private server (more impulsive domain-buying behaviour). But I’m an author, not a coder, and I wouldn’t have done any of this without AI.
Mostly, I have a blog because I enjoy writing, and I enjoy teaching. But the platform is important. The medium is the message for many digital texts, and I want the message of my writing to be, “here I am, come visit me whenever you like.”
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