81–90 of 405 posts
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation. Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
I restarted my blog after a 20 year break ( https://jonathanclark.com ) thanks to AI making taking out the drudgery.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
Are personal blogs back? My personal blog ten years ago (even twenty years ago) received a lot of direct traffic on all sorts of things from the primary search engines and so on. Nowadays, the only search engine that delivers any traffic to my site is Kagi! Looking back, I haven't changed my style of writing very much, so I suspect the reality is that I've just fallen behind in a comparative sense. There are much bet…
Your blog seems to be broken.
I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.
Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!
> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)
And another where I say
> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.
It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation. Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034
Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)
I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages, and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a handful of visits daily.
I don’t think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a “niche blog” becomes sustainable and “profitable”, it is no longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a publication.
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight. To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op E…
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.