
'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs - raybb
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-expert-twitter-only-goes-so-far-bring-back-blogs/
======
themodelplumber
> Having a consistent WordPress configuration with dedicated IT support would
> enable many more of these experts to easily post and update material more
> frequently

I think it's worth a try! Kudos to the author. Information strategies are a
great thing to examine and bring forward toward the next big worldwide
disaster.

But the part above made me wonder. I used to set up a lot of blogs for people
who were experts at the top of their respective fields. They seemed to "get"
blogging. That part was nice--they knew what they needed to do.

The "doing" is hard though. Blogging isn't just writing, and it's not just
writing online. It's more than that. It's a bunch of questions like "is
anybody reading this, and if so how can I tell." It's also "do I get to block
people, and if so how does that work." And "why do people have to go digging
through here to see my best stuff." And even learning to link your articles to
one another, consistently, and to good effect, can take years.

The questions alone can quickly overwhelm IT support because at the beginning,
they morph into feature requests at the drop of a hat. And the unanswered
feature request becomes yet another reason not to blog. So the IT support also
needs to be clever enough and empowered enough to say, "here's the part where
instead of supporting you by changing your blog header or sidebar or whatever,
we provide training in what is expected of you." Maybe an institution like the
author is thinking of could do that.

I would also expect at least a _little_ bit of new, never-before-seen tech
that adds a bit more community visibility and pressure to get writing, for
example. You have to put in the consistent practice to find your blogging
feet, otherwise it's yet one more new and weird form of writing with which to
come to grips every time you sit down. But overall, blogging can be upgraded
in many technical ways and improved over time--it's not stuck at all and that
un-stuckness could potentially be leveraged to provide even better results
from "standard blogging" than what the author is expecting.

