Bryan Cantrill discusses what he has learned after 20 years of blogging through the decades. I too, crossed the two decade mark this past February. Bryan was asked four questions on the occasion by Cynthia Dunlop.
- What blog entry was I most proud of?
- Which one was most difficult to write?
- What impact of blogging have I found surprising?
- What advice would I have for those getting started with blogging?
So I thought it might be a good idea for me to do the same.
1. I am proud of a post that received the most negative feedback ever. I was even asked to change the title of the post. Our future is networked and feminine looked at how there were many ancient tribal societies led by women but both the advent of institutions, like kingdoms and religions ‘of the book’, and later capitalist markets were clearly male-dominated. Today, in a network society, we are seeing more avenues for feminine influence, as evidenced by movements like ‘me too’, and of course there is a resulting push-back from patriarchal institutions and markets. The shift is not complete but if we don’t blow ourselves up, I think it will happen.
2. Several posts were difficult to write. The death of a dear friend, Graham McTavish Watt, was painful. So was that of my mother-in-law, Budge Wilson, as I wanted to have a place online that linked to many other tributes. Writing about a book — all for nothing — that reflected the experiences of my mother during the defeat of Prussia in 1945 was not easy either. What all three have in common is that they were personal.
3. Blogging has made my writing better [surprise!]. It has also created some very strong bonds with other bloggers. One example would be Luis Suarez, whom I have never met and we continue to meet online in several communities and networks over 20 years. But I have felt that the impact of blogging seems to have waned in the past five years. I think we may see a resurgence in the future, though getting scraped by AI large language models is a bit depressing.
4. My advice for anyone interested in blogging is this — write for yourself. It is the only way you will be able to persevere.
Hi, Harold, gosh, this is a rather timely blog post. In the last week, I have been having conversations with different people who claim you just can’t build long-lasting, trustworthy, nurturing relationships with others unless you are co-located on the same physical space. Well, well, well, here we are, we know each other for over 20 years and we’ve never met!
Yet through our blogs we started having conversations about different topics and eventually that spread into using social media tools to then online community spaces and I trust you as a dear friend more than I would different people I know from face to face conversations!
I don’t know whether blogging will have a comeback, or not. I think it never left. I just feel we are starting to warm up again to the idea of re-owning the Open Social Web, given the current enshittification of social media tools, and as such I am surely glad to still have a blog with which to carry on our conversations, along with those other online community spaces. Here’s to many more years strengthening those bonds!