I started blogging in 2004. I’m still at it, even though blogs have gone\u00a0out of fashion. But when I look at what passes today for free online and electronically-delivered written content … long posts on Facebook that nobody reads, threaded posts on Twitter, Tumblr and Storify accounts, visual stories on Instagram, email newsletters … it’s hard to see how any of these are better than traditional weblogs. IMO they’re worse. Twitter threads are so frustrating to read,\u00a0developers have come up with apps to combine individual tweets in a series into single, long documents. Newsletters are hit and miss … how, for example, do you even find out about them? It’s not like they’re out there on the web for anyone to discover via Google. When you do learn of one you may be interested in, via word of mouth or Twitter, you have to subscribe to it. And when it comes to telling stories or commenting on the world around us,\u00a0most of us are writers, not visual artists.<\/p>\n
Any way you cut it, blogging is still the best way to write for an online audience, and owning your own blog gives you more freedom than you’ll get on a platform like Tumblr. Your blog will live\u00a0at a fixed, known web address and readers can drop\u00a0by any time they want. What could be more effective than that? What could be more writer-friendly? What could be more user-friendly? What could be simpler?<\/p>\n
Slave to fashion that I am, I did start a newsletter<\/a>\u00a0a few years ago. It was a struggle to come with things to write about that weren’t already on my blog. I tried to use the newsletter to share some of the more intimate details of my life, but after a while realized I was just as comfortable sharing that stuff on my blog. My last newsletter went out\u00a0in February 2018. Since then, everything I’ve felt like sharing publicly has been on my blog.<\/p>\n I’ve never tried to make money\u00a0off this. There are no ads on my blog.\u00a0A lot of blogs have them, and I\u00a0find them off-putting and distracting. Over the years marketers have offered me money to add sponsored posts to my blog, but I always delete their pitches. Why would anyone want to read a pitch for Ray-Bans? You can get that on Facebook. Now, apparently, people who write electronic newsletters are starting to ask\u00a0for subscription fees. I never did that with my newsletter. If I ever write and self-publish a book, sure, I’ll try to sell it\u00a0through Amazon, but that’s different.<\/p>\n One of the bloggers I most admire\u00a0calls herself\u00a0Mimi Smartypants<\/a>. She\u00a0started in 1999, when blogs were called diaries and diarists\u00a0used pen names.\u00a0She still calls her blog a diary, and has never, to my knowledge, shared her real name with readers.\u00a0True, she got a book deal based on her early diary entries, but she never monetized the diary itself. It’s still there, still free,\u00a0unsullied by banner ads, sponsored posts, or tailored marketing.<\/p>\n