by (Trigger Warning: This is a vanity post containing high volumes of naval-gazing)
Ever since I started getting serious about posting to this blog – as well as the Voce and PNConnect blogs – I’ve been struggling with a basic question: Where to post?
The reality is that the old blog model of posting on a single blog and hoping for links from other blog writers is more or less dead now. Or at least it’s very, very ill. RSS has fallen out of favor with the rise of social networks. And many of the blogger who became successful in the early days is no longer linking out to other people, just to previous posts they wrote themselves because that’s apparently cool now.
Reading a post by Jay Rosen titled “Blogging is Doing Your Work In Public” helped me make up my mind on a few things, particularly when I got to this quote:
One thing that’s different about blogging today compared to when I started in 2003: now you have to “go where the people are” online. You can’t rely on them coming to you just because you published something new.
Also influencing my thinking was the coincidentally-timed op-ed in Wired on “plogging,” or blogging on platforms. Julia Greenberg who wrote that story points out that everyone – LinkedIn, Facebook and others – all want you to publish long-form posts on their networks. And their efforts have attracted some serious attention..
That’s very true and so here’s what I’ve decided:
As much as it may not be ideal (at least based on the beliefs and ideas that I came up with and still, maybe stubbornly, cling to, I’m going to commit to cross-posting most of what I write here as well as on the Voce and PNConnect blogs. So the MMM columns will still be exclusive to this blog but the other posts I write I’m going to cross-post on both LinkedIn and Medium.
I’ve flirted with this from time to time but I think it’s well past time I commit to it and realize this is the way things are today. I’d love to still be operating in a world where I could attract all kinds of attention to this blog through links and such, but those days have likely passed. I stand firmly with Thomas Ricker who wrote about how RSS is still the bomb and the biggest single way I get my news but I’m aware enough to know that puts me squarely in the minority. So I’m going where the people are and not deluding myself to believe everyone will magically come to me.
It’s a distributed world and, if I were a client, I’d be giving myself just this advice. So it’s time I took it.
