It’s great to see posts like this one from Hugh MacLeod: “Reclaim Blogging”: Why I’m giving up Twitter and Facebook, mainly because he highlights a few key points that freedom loving people everywhere should identify with:
…Over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.
The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.
I’m fine with people using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, etc… I use them all too, but much of what I do on those services involves driving people here to my blog. And it’s not about eyeballs and revenue as much as it’s about sovereignty, longevity, freedom, and identity. Since starting in 1997, things like Friendster, and Vox, and even Myspace, have risen and fallen. I didn’t get locked into any of them. I didn’t choose LiveJournal, or Pitas, or any of the other hosted services out there, but chose to have my own domain, and put my stake in the ground here. And today I can still link to a post I wrote 14 years ago, and it’s there. It hasn’t disappeared due to some third party shutting down a service, or a startup running out of funding. It’s there because I kept it there, and I kept it safe.
I think now is a good time to remind people why we all got into blogging in the first place, all those years ago. I think now is a great time to “reclaim” blogging, so that is exactly what I’m doing. Here and now. Rock on.
And why did I get into blogging? I started in the personal publishing world in the mid-1980s when zines printed on paper was the best you could do… Once the web came along, I saw the potential, and jumped on it. The Internet is a world-wide publishing platform where the distribution costs are close enough to zero to make it available to anyone. Think about it. Think about it in terms of publishing in the 19th or early 20th century…That’s pretty damn powerful.
So remember kids, if you’ve got a blog, keep it up… if you abandoned it, reclaim it… and if you don’t have one, start one now.
See, I’ve been using Twitter for a long time… since September 2006 supposedly. I’d love to go back and see what my first dozen tweets look like, but Twitter doesn’t allow that. I’ve been kicking myself for not saving all of that data since the beginning, but with micro-content you tend to think that a. It’s tiny, so it doesn’t matter, and b. It’ll always be there. We’ve learned (time and time again) that this isn’t the case.
