On Blogging

After nearly a year at Razorfish, I’m resuscitating my blog. Why? Because blogging gets me out of the weeds and makes me smarter. In a way, I kind of think blogs are dead. Or more realistically, they’re just not as important as they were 6 or 7 years ago, when self-publishing was a transformative facet of the online experience. But for me, the practice of blogging is so very useful—it wakes me up to the interest and meaning of day-to-day things, and not doing it for the past year has made me dumber and less happy.

Here are a couple tidbits about how I approach blogging in a way that really works for me:

 

Never mind the audience.

If you’re trying to get famous blogging, you’re wasting your time. 99% of famous bloggers didn’t get famous by blogging—they have popular blogs because they’re famous, not the other way around. So don’t write for your audience. Write for yourself!

Nobody’s going to care. But more importantly, writing for yourself means no apologies and no excuses. You’re accountable to yourself alone for the quality of your thinking and for deciding what’s interesting and valuable to pay attention to. You’re the one who decides what matters—avoid trying to be popular and you’ll avoid the echo-chamber.

I’m not saying disrespect your audience! Don’t publish junk. Take pride in what you write, but take pride in how your thinking represents you, not in how much ephemeral attention or “popularity” your posts generate.

 

Always be blogging.

I’ll typically have a few dozen posts in draft mode at any given time. Every time I hear something interesting or have an idea I want to remember, I start a new post. (I use Windows Live Writer, which I think is still the best authoring tool out there.) Maybe a quarter of my draft posts ever get finished. So I essentially keep a long running list of things I’m thinking about, and whenever the ideas develop a bit I spend 5 or 10 minutes adding to the post.

Who cares if I waste time on posts I don’t end up publishing? The point, for me, is to keep thinking about stuff, not to finish anything. And because I’m not writing for a nonexistent audience that isn’t waiting with bated breath for my next post or who will stop loving me if my next post isn’t for another month, there’s really no pressure to finish posts. Writing for myself sure is less stressful!

 

Don’t try to “keep up.”

Forget about linking to other bloggers, cruising the web looking for relevant places to comment, etc—all the conventional wisdom from 5 years ago about how to build a following for your blog is less than unhelpful—it’s counterproductive to the development of original ideas.

And creating commentary on the hamster wheel of industry news is a waste of time. I actually think there’s a new kind of domain knowledge these days, and it’s less about collecting the full set of information, the traditional way of looking at mastery, and more about knowing what amidst all the noise you need to pay attention to because it matters. Filtering, not accumulation.

Don’t try to keep up. Instead, think hard about the stuff that sticks.

When I interview people, I always ask what they think the brave new world will look like. This is my way of understanding how well candidates can filter out the noise and tell a clear story about what really matters. And blogging is the way I get there, personally—which means not trying to be an industry commentator, but trying to be bigger than the industry, being about culture not news.

 

Anyway, if you’re reading this, I look forward to your feedback. And in return I promise to start actually blogging again! 

 

Comments

[Jasonyormark]

Great post Ryan. I'm not so sure I agree with blogging being dead. Don't get me wrong, the web is saturated with crap with as easy as web publishing has become, but I still consume 90% of what I learn through some really great blogs (famous and not so much).

Personally I find the satisfaction in blogging on topics that others find helpful in some way. That's always been my driving force.

+1 on Windows Live Writer, and your approach to keeping multiple blog articles on tap. I struggle with that myself.

Glad to see you'll be back writing and look forward to your insights.

[Christine Thompson]

Ryan, I totally agree with your motivations: write for yourself, to clarify your ideas and understanding of situations or concepts, rather than pursue cheap tricks to try to boost unique page views.

My personal "toolbox" includes LiveWriter (I run Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro in order to use LiveWriter) and WordPress. I also use Evernote to capture random thoughts or ideas about potential blog posts. It's also handy for organizing online sources to look at later when I ready to start drafting a new post.

[Valmohney]

I'm just reworking my story as I update and extend my blog, slowly nudging it into new and more useful territory. I'm challenged by both what to write and to do so in a timely way. Thanks for the tips, I'm glad your tweet caught my eye and that I got to take the time to read your post.

[Rachel Elkington]

I'm glad you're back to blogging, RT!

[Brook Ellingwood]

Your timing with this couldn't have been more perfect. I've been working through some similar thoughts lately, especially on the need to filter and understand instead of endlessly trying to keep up.

Seth Godin recently described the "drive by technorati" as people who never stick with something long enough to build anything with it. I'm seeing a lot of parallels with your post. (Hmmm. I almost blogged about Godin's post when I read it. Maybe I should now. For my own clarity of mind of course...)

[Rex McFarlin]

Hot! Ryan!

A nod to the fact that thinking well out loud matters.

It reminds me of something I heard that Frank Zappa said: noodle (practice improvising and improvise music) intelligently. When noodling intelligently, a musician is working from the theoritical foundation in which she's been immersed and been seeking out new musical ideas. The musician spends time in a process of discovering new and meaningful melodies and musical ideas for the sake of doing it and for gaining a deeper understanding of her music. This noodling isn't necessarily done directly for the audience (though the best noodling presents depths of joy for the audience -- consider works by jazz greats, for instance), and it affords the opportunity to discover new and meaningful musical ideas.

Blogging seems, then, to be similar to the activity of a noodling musician, whose goal is to create, in the moment, a melody as significant and beautiful as the composed melody.

[JennRolniak]

Hi Ryan. Thank you for the follows on Twitter. I'm very excited to meet you and the entire team over the coming weeks. And as I get to know everyone 'virtually' before Monday, I thought I'd take a some time to check out your blog.

I realize the post is from April so I'm not sure if you're still receiving comment notifications, but I think some your points and approach are interesting. It struck a chord on a personal level too.

I have to agree with the person above about blogs not necessarily being dead. My personal take is that people who started the "This is what I ate for breakfast" type blogs have long since moved to Facebook and Twitter for their chatter. However, I feel bloggers who are passionate about a topic, have thoughtful ideas to share and take the time to learn more are the ones that are the most successful. Those are the resources we come to check time and again, but my guess is, they'd probably still be sharing their ideas in some way even if we weren't reading.

As a new blogger myself, one of the thoughts that finally got me to pull the trigger and just blog already was the realization it's my blog and at the end of the day, I'm accountable only to me. The things it involves were activities I was interested in anyway, and the only way to improve as a writer is to just get out there and write. It's a pretty liberating thought and I think it's well articulated in your post.

Thanks for sharing your experience as a blogger. I look forward to learning more about your perspective on all things social media. Enjoy your weekend!