So, it has been a while since I’ve posted on my blog. Partly due to stress and busyness and partly due to lack of motivation, I’ve let this corner of my web presence languish.
I’m going to try to make that right.
I listen to Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast regularly and he started season 2 with a reflective on how his blog has changed and moved over time and how his goals to improve his engagement through it have adapted. I love Seth’s podcasts and I love his short, insightful, daily blog posts. One of the challenges he gave in the podcast was to take more charge over where you build an audience and where you interact with people if you are a creator.
I am a creator, though still one in training. So his words struck a chord in me. But I wasn’t seeing a ton through my blog whereas Facebook seemed to hold more promise. But I don’t control the information on Facebook and I definitely don’t control Facebook’s policies.
Add the recent problems with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytics scandal and the decision to start pushing autoplay ads in FB Messenger chats and I finally decided that enough had happened to push me back towards regaining some control over my web presence.
I don’t have a lot of readers here yet, but I have some. And to you I apologize for disappearing these last few month. Instead, I’m going to try to do something that Seth suggested in the podcast: regular, disciplined blog posts.
And I’m going to do it a more motivated way – I want to post myself some challenges. First challenge: have 5 regular readers who comment on posts at least once a week.
That’s a challenge for me to be willing to be more creative in what I think and post so that there’s something interesting to comment on. More frequent and often shorter – a thought may be enough.
And it goes directly towards doing something I have been feeling for a while about helping to foster a community of trustworthy writers. Well, I’m want to extend that now to trustworthy creators – coders, makers, developers, crafters, artisans, and thinkers. If you create, if you share something new with the world, you will be welcome here. I value your thoughts and insights on whatever topics get discussed and I look forward to getting to know you better.
Grant Michael Gardner 
Somehow I guessed you were really busy offline with your main job since there weren’t any news from that Writing Excuses podcast and I couldn’t find the time to comment on it either.
Now, you’re mentioning as a goal, having 5Â regular readers who comment on your posts. In that area I think I can be of some help since my own blog had some 1200Â young detectives to play and interact with me. Two rules are in order to make a blog worthwhile:
(1) Providing value that you can’t find elsewhere on the Internet. Mine consisted in scanlation and fansub works, with the help of a 7 people team (17 at its peak) for whom I was the voice. We strived for extremely high quality, and it showed.
(2) Prepare a schedule and post in a very regular fashion. For instance, at 10:00PM every Tuesday. Not 10:01PM, not 09:55PM.
Of course there are a few other tips like “keep your messages short and concise, your audience must be able to read them within 5Â min” or “2 or 3 sections are ok, 4 means you don’t care”, “don’t forget to use comical effects to create transitions”, “to receive comments never forget to either ask for opinions or to hammer a questionable chord like a madman” but that’s mainly because my audience was young, i.e. with a short attention span.
That leads me to think maybe you should highlight your main points of interest in the design of your blog. I mean, below I’m talking politics and IT, but this blog, as far as I know, is more about text writing, literature and storytelling. Just with sparks and dots about keyboards (^o^/) or ergonomics.
Now, I don’t think the Cambrige Analytics scandal was really aimed at saying Facebook is just using their users’ data to make profit while influencing politics. I think the real target here is to show the GDPR off for Europe. “If you don’t take your data seriously, what happened in the US might just happen to your country”, see what I mean? To some extent I’m kind of glad to see that the tech-savvy ‘muricans do care about how the GAFAM and the BATX are [censored] them up big time.
At any rate, it’s good to read you again. See you later, Grant 🙂 .
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Yep, those are the kinds of things I’d like to target – regular-ish posting, shorter post, etc. My point in having the number target is just giving myself a milestone.
I think my main motivation lies in taking a more active role in building community, rather than just audience. Part of what the internet has provided is opportunities for interaction that couldn’t have happened before. This conversation is just one such example as you and I live separated by an ocean and hours of time. I like how that interaction can be used to build community – the sharing of ideas. So thank you for always being willing to comment and bring them.
And yes, this is a community that will likely revolve around story to a degree just because I have an interest in it, but there’s going to be some futurism, technology, family dynamics, and psychology discussion too. Hopefully, I won’t get too disparate. 🙂
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