
Your Words are Wasted - d4nt
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx
======
mechanical_fish
So many things one could say. Maybe I'll try to blog some of them. If I can
overwhelm my irritation at my blogging software.

Why does paying App.net a bit over four dollars a month make me a member of an
elitist "country club", while paying _much more_ than that for my own domain
and hosting and backups and uptime monitoring and rapid application of
security patches and the talent needed to manage all that makes me a salt-of-
the-earth man of the people? Seems like that's only true from a very specific
perspective.

I've made too much money setting up other people's blog software to pretend I
don't understand why Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr (and even HN, for that
matter) are better. People don't want to be publishers. They don't even want
to be writers. They want to share things online with their friends.

I see a lot of complaints in this essay about archiving - you can't find old
content, you can't save old content. Archiving is overrated. And I say that as
someone who loves archives and archivists. It _is_ important to save things,
but most writing is not intended for the ages. Quite the opposite: The fact
that one can spout some crazy in-jokes to one's friends on Twitter, and in a
week from now nobody will be able to find those words, is a _feature_. And the
fact that, in truth, Twitter and Facebook are almost certainly quietly
archiving all your drunken rants forever, such that twenty years from now your
neighbors will be able to pull them right up and show them to their dinner
guests for a laugh, is a _terrifying bug_.

Again, most people don't want to be librarians, publishers, journalists,
historians, ethnologists, typesetters, designers, promoters, SEO experts, or
proud users of a piece of software. And even those of us who _do_ want some of
these things enjoy taking a break once in a while. We just want to socialize.

~~~
LiveTheDream
The money argument doesn't hold; it's $10/year for a domain name and hosting
is free on github pages or heroku.

------
grovulent
I really don't get the all or nothing attitude of this article.

I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account. The blog gets my best
content. But it's not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing
social graph (social buttons notwithstanding).

G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff. It allows me to cheaply
signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new
readers/relationships. I don't care if I offend people on G+ because I'm there
to attract the like minded. So I say what I think.

And facebook is just a socialisation wheel greaser for local friendships. Here
I'm much more guarded. I use content posted by people as conversation starters
for when I see them in real life. I might have to deal with these people - so
I keep it light, fluffy and fun. I personally don't care if facebook deletes
all that content. (I see it as a medium risk since facebook isn't a
particularly diversified business)

I decided a while ago that I need to engage on all these platforms - because
concentrating solely on a blog only increases your overall isolation to your
local life - cause it takes an enormous amount of time - and even your closest
local friends aren't likely to even read it.

It might mean that I'll never put enough time into the blog for it be a
standalone success. But the odds of that ever happening were slim to nil
anyway - even if it did get 100 percent of my time. And there would have been
a very high chance that I would have been miserable because such dedication
would have led to a high degree of isolation.

This is the right balance for me. I don't expect everyone to have the same
view - but then I'm not claiming it's right for everyone.

~~~
shanselman
I think we agree with "the blog gets my best content." I'm active (and it
works) on all major networks. The tone of the article is intense only because
I'll never put my best work on G+ for example, and I was surprised when Yegge
did a 6 Yegge long article on G+ rather than his own site, even if he works
for Google+.

~~~
grovulent
well the title of the article is 'your words are wasted' - which is a bit
hyperbolic if you agree with the diversification view. That title - along with
the content that follows - seems to imply that it's a waste of time if it
isn't going onto your own blog.

Don't get me wrong - I would love for there to be a decentralised social graph
that allowed us to eat our cake and have it too. But that aint going to happen
any time soon.

------
john_flintstone
I run blogs on the websites of two businesses I'm associated with. In both
cases the intent is not to start a conversation, but to pull in traffic and
visitors from Google. Comments are not enabled. I usually base the blog topics
on keyword searches that we want to target, and craft posts around that -
discussing the topic and tying the business to that topic.

For static websites, even eCommerce websites, it's a great and effective way
to add fresh content and pages to a site, and push up its rankings.

I'm a fast writer - easily able to produce a 600 word post in 20 minutes - and
I write prose that is easy to read. The strategy works - on a robot level
(Google), and on a human level (customers), but it takes time and persistence.
It may take 6 months for a series of posts to cause a category page to rank in
the top 3 of Google - in some cases longer.

It's also a strategy that many competitors cannot duplicate, as most are
unable to write regular, meaningful blog posts. It's one of those SEO tactics
that requires actual, real work, which is why so few do it well.

Wordpress, with a custom theme that fits in seamlessly with the website, is
the way to go.

------
aj700
I prefer a domain and my own server. But nobody will see what I write. The
_average_ user can't use G Reader. They can use twitter and facebook. Why
hasn't this issue been solved? I want a network with friends who are users
that gives me control. Contradiction in terms?

~~~
schrijver
It’s simple really. Whenever I write a blog post, I post a link on my facebook
page. I get pretty decent click-through rates. And at the same time, the post
is there for the rest of the web too.

------
gambler
Your words are most likely wasted on a blog too. If the choices are social
network or blog, we're kind of screwed. I used to read paper magazine articles
because they were interesting to read. I bought a magazine and read it like a
book, like a collection of stories. There is almost nothing that comes close
to that experience online. Some forums, maybe, but that's it. Nowadays you
have to scan through several hundred items to find one interesting article to
read, and even that will be short, time-sensitive and optimized for skimming
rather than reading.

~~~
khyryk
Also optimized for self-promotion, which is targeted at a certain minority
that I am and probably will never be a part of, such as employers.

------
PStamatiou
I could not agree more with Scott. I still have the hardest time trying to
convince people to start a blog. "I don't have time to blog" "I don't know
what I'd write about".. yet they end up posting lots of content casually on
various social networks/forums.

Perhaps blogging tools need to adapt to more short form uses and have posting
interfaces that seem more accommodating rather than a massive empty textarea
with tons of options from slug to categories and tags.

The WordPress Prologue/P2 themes comes to mind.

~~~
brandnewlow
I think both of those objections only partially convey their real meaning.

"I don't have time to blog" = "The time it would take me to blog is worth more
to me than the ROI I'd get from writing a blog."

and "I don't know what I'd write about" = "I don't know who'd be reading my
blog so as to make it easy to know what to write about."

Facebook and Twitter address both objections by giving users a well-defined,
sometimes really big audience.

The idea of writing stuff they think no one's going to read isn't very
appetizing to most people.

------
mikle
Since the discussion is fragmented between the blog comments and here, I'm
posting my comment on his blog here too.

I recently started blogging and my first blog post about why I blog has
exactly the same reasons - control over content and flexibility.

I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now
I'm starting to get discouraged - it's not that I don't like the blog it just
that it got zero traction outside my circle of techie friends. I launched a
small Trello app at the same time and even though both got zero marketing the
app is about 3 times more popular by views and tens of times more popular by
users (granted it is still only hundreds of views and tens of users).

What has discouraged me the most is that even when I put myself out there and
posted something relevant and interesting (IMHO) on Hacker News I got exactly
1 vote and no comments. It's not even that it is bad, it's ignored.

I know that a month is not something substantial and if I continue to create
interesting content people will eventually come (with some marketing). I just
want to have a counter-point that a blog is not just writing text on your on
domain - you have to market it and even than people might not care, just like
any other product.

<shameless_promotion>

<http://sveder.com/blog>

</shameless_promotion>

~~~
Evgeny
_I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and
now I'm starting to get discouraged_

Would it be possible for you to blog not for the traction, but for the sake of
blogging?

I think my blog was closed to everyone but me for the first couple of years I
was posting - I just did not want my employer to stumble upon it by random
chance, I had no idea what the reaction could be. But I found out that it was
still useful - a number of times, when I had to remember something about the
way I solved some particular problem, I searched my own blog and found it.

Now it's almost a habit - whenever I do something even remotely interesting,
it pops into my head - wait, I could write a short blog post about it in 10-15
minutes. So I do.

~~~
mikle
It's a balance. I post for myself but I would like feedback on it and to learn
from it. There is a huge difference between the documentation and personal
knowledge base I have on my personal OneNote notebooks and the public blog -
it takes me a few hours for each blog post. I add pictures, format, spell and
grammar check since English is not my mother tongue etc. If I see I don't get
any benefit from all this polish I will be discouraged from doing it and will
just keep it in its raw stream-of-thought form for personal use.

~~~
shanselman
I blogged in a vacuum for almost two years without an audience. An audience
has shown up since then but I continue to blog for me. Just being able to
google for my thoughts the years later makes it worth it.

~~~
mikle
Well I'm preparing myself for that, but as I said, this means that getting
actual apps out there will still be a priority for me over blogging, or the
blog's quality will suffer.

I'm kinda interested at why you chose to reply to the thread here instead of
the same comment posted in your blog? I feel that the discussion here is of
higher quality (whatever that means), but the blog is, as you advocate, your
own space. I've seen some blogs without comments and all the discussion is
happening on Hacker News or Reddit, so I'd like to hear your thoughts about
it.

~~~
shanselman
Well, in a perfect world we'd have a single "place" to go that would aggregate
content AND comments. That was the promise of clients like FeedDemon and RSS
for Comments. However, Google Reader doesn't support comments and as such,
that died.

I worry about things like Disqus as well as they are just another place to put
our content. It looks like it's on our site but it's not. They WILL die one
day and then what happens to the comments?

For now, I go where the discussion is but I'd prefer to own both.

~~~
mikle
Just a brainstorm here, but would some kind of Disqus like ui that aggregates
comments from HN, reddit and blog comment feed would be an interesting
product?

(Google search shows two such apps - one has shutdown and one is now a casino
site... Maybe it's just not profitable.)

------
droob
But all the _people_ are in those "walled gardens," and if you're not trying
to create a permanent archive of your words for the ages, it makes more sense
to chose the platform that makes it easier to interact with an audience,
rather than one that preserves everything you write forever.

------
politician
It's intriguing hear Scott echo RMS. Although Scott limits his argument to the
consequences of relying on corporations for services, a similar argument can
be made regarding the behavior of governments (domain name seizures, for
example).

I'd be interested in hearing where/how he draws the line.

------
zacharyvoase
One obstacle, in my eyes, is that some of the best blogging software out there
is provided in a Software-as-a-Service model. This is, of course, less of a
headache for the original developers—they have a guaranteed long-term income
(rather than one-off license fees), and they don’t have to worry about
portability or varying server specs. The result is that now, if a person wants
to run his/her own blog and have total control over the content, s/he will
need to write the software for it. I personally wouldn’t mind paying several
hundred dollars for a piece of really good blogging software.

N.B.: I looked into Wordpress et al., but I always avoid using software
written in PHP if I can, and theming in Wordpress involves more time than I
have to spare.

~~~
shanselman
But one could go to Amazon or Azure or Herok and install Wordpress in 20
minutes from start to finish and OWN it...if this process could include domain
names and take just 2 minutes...

~~~
uncoder0
<http://iwantmyname.com/> lets you do it in ~2minutes.

------
larrys
"Own your space on the Web, and pay for it."

"You want control? Buy a domain and blog there. "

And at the very least if you don't want to pay or setup your own hosting site
(and want to go the free route) at least register your own domain and have it
pointed by cname or web forwarding to any of the free hosting providers out
there. (Making sure to keep a backup of course).

Of course since true web hosting can be had very cheaply today (this isn't
1996) there really isn't any reason to just not setup your own site. If you
are going to take the time to write something you can spend .50 per day (or
less) on web hosting. What's your time worth?

------
theolymp
in addition to that, all the big players KNOW that, like google, facebook etc.
we wrote a paper about nosql-thingies... they're developed EXACTLY for this
usage scenario - just store temporary non-over-the-ages-important data on some
cheap maschines... if the data is lost, okay, the data is lost - shit on acid,
shit on persistency, shit on consistency, but all the "un-interesting data"
should be served fast -- this was the DoB of nosql.

can YOU imagine, that any big newspaper or library will store the (maybe)
really important things on this systems - or ANYTHING else outside the blog-
sharosphere? (sharophere should get the right buzzword for this activism)
no... not really...

imho and like "mechanical_fish" mentioned, all people think, that their data,
blog-entries, pictures or even JOKES are so important (funny/cool/needed),
that should be shared all over the world... i'm not an anti-share-man in
contrast to that, i REALLY use twitter, facebook etc., but the "hype" on
blogging is too much for me.

let me clarify this a little bit and maybe from a technical point of view: in
the last years, since ANYBODY thinks, that their mini-uncomplicated solution
for $this problem in $that language that this should be shared, because it's
"really important", the web is full of trash and blog-entries, where the
question is searched an answer to, is just rewritten, WITHOUT an answer. any
of you should now the problem, that you REALLY have to investigate now, to get
a solution for a more complex problem or EVEN an academic paper/research-
website... the web is full of junk and i'm not feeling lucky about that.

what do you mean?

------
splattne
Isn't it ironic that we discuss the article here and not on Scott's blog?

~~~
huggyface
Isn't it ironic that anyone discusses it on Scott's blog and not on their own
blog?

------
haddr
argument saying that your post might dissapear is wrong. how long will you
host your blog when you're not feeling like writing blogposts anymore?

~~~
shanselman
Why would I stop running a website? It's a cheap VPS that I use for lots of
things. No reason for it to go away.

------
thinkingisfun
I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely:

[http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-
services...](http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services-
long-live-web-services/)

 _What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and
provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can
imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever
metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn’t one of the points of the
semantic web to make decentralized information meaningful, retrievable and
mixable?

So instead of having our own websites aggregate our own data from other
people’s websites, we’ll let other people use the data from our own websites.
Photos, meaningfully tagged, can be pulled in by Flickr via our own personal
API, if you will. We provide the structured data, Flickr provides the
functionality. The sharing. The social. Why not?

Personal publishing platforms like WordPress, Drupal, [your favorite here]
could be extended to make use of microformatting, RDF, etc. and provide tools
for syndication, as we now do with simple blogposts. Services don’t need to
host our data. They only need to do cool things with it._

~~~
shanselman
I love this. Exactly. There's no reason we can't do this other than the will
to do it. The social web could be open and distributed and web-like while
still _looking_ centralized like twitter.

~~~
jessedhillon
It seems that you are disregarding the vast majority of
Facebook/Google+/whatever users -- who _still_ don't know how to, or don't
want to setup their own domain and manage blogging software. Yet, they also
want to have a place to put their voice out there.

A system like the one that GP proposes, while it could be pretty awesome,
would be limited to a very small, extremely homogenous population. It's not
hard to see why Facebook beats that.

~~~
shanselman
I would argue that it could be made possible to allow folks to get domains,
hosting and software that they control as easily as buying a toy on Amazon.
Domains, DNS and hosting setup doesn't need to be hard - it's hard because no
one has tried to change it.

~~~
jessedhillon
I have to disagree. Dreamhost makes it very simple to register a domain and
have WP installed. Wordpress.com makes it simpler still. How much simpler does
it need to be?

Everyone knows what WordPress is, I think people who entertain the idea of
publishing are aware of their options now. The draw of social networks is that
there is a low friction process -- facilitated by an interested party -- which
makes it very easy to go from ideation to publication. Until very recent
versions of WP, it was a pain in the ass (from a regular user's perspective)
to simply post a set of pictures along with some thoughts.

If we look at your set of questions, something like e.g. Facebook provides
answers to all of them which are, yes unsatisfying, but the trade off is a
low-effort process.

EDIT: Also, out of curiosity what do you use to host your site, and how/why
did you choose it?

~~~
shanselman
Well, arguably it has to be as easy (and hip and fun and attractive) as
signing up for Twitter.

~~~
ThomPete
Easier but yes.

------
huggyface
Blogging is dead.

I ran a fairly successful blog (front paged here a number of times). I
recently cut the cord and abandoned it. The blogging tail is getting shorter
and shorter as more and more people move to the closed and walled gardens.

I shut it down because it was the _illusion_ of accomplishment: every time I
got a hit entry I would assure myself that I've moved forward in some way,
achieved something, etc. Whenever I thought about doing something actually
beneficial, the easiest procrastination was to just go do a blog post instead,
imagining that every hit actually meant something. That I was somehow
accumulating assets in something worthwhile.

It achieves nothing, at least if you're already established. If you're new to
the industry and unproven then it's a good way of trying to fake it before you
make it, but if you're professionally grounded, it's a liability as much as a
benefit.

Worse there is a tendency for readership to start to control what you write
about, which is one reason I moved to more free-form content on a walled
garden: I'll write about a caterpillar in the yard, my new lawn tractor, and
some new development in Android, all because I no longer fool myself into
thinking the blog is a business. It's just some random thoughts, whether read
or not.

The time spent writing it -- even if you're pretty successful at it -- would
almost always be better spent on other endeavours. To bring up some examples
oft cited on here, John Gruber is one of the most successful bloggers, as is
Marco Arment. They're reduced to trying to pitch t-shirts and affiliate links.
Neither of them -- despite volumes of words spilled onto epaper -- change
anything in the industry through their respective blogs. A lot of words
evaporating into the ether, the converted incited into a chorus of the echo
chamber.

