#Back2Blog and my current thinking around this blog

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An interesting post from Stephanie Tara caught my eye last week – she was ‘rebooting’ her blog with the #Back2Blog hashtag, and committing to ten blog posts over ten days.

For the next ten days [starting Monday 24th June, today], I’m going to write a post a day. I’ll keep it short: blogging used to be quick and dirty, and somewhere between the arrival of Facebook and Twitter, posts have started growing into long essays that take hours to write…

How short is short? Roughly a screenful. Not more. I have a ton of ideas to blog about, and view this as an exercise in concision, as well as a way to get myself blogging again — which I seem to periodically need to do.

Neither would it be a solo effort, she was inviting many of ‘the old guard’ to join in. So for the ten days, I’m going to blog not as the links and snap thoughts of the last six months, but with some extended thoughts and ideas from across the landscape – Steph’s ‘roughly a screenful’ feels about right.

This should be interesting… let’s start with a blog about this blog.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think that the blog needs a ‘reboot’ because I sat down last year to decide what I wanted from this blog and implemented the plan on January 1st.

That plan was a bit of a back to basics, focusing on ‘web logging’. Living on the internet means coming across lots of articles, points of interests, and almost all of them create an emotion, be it a joke, a profound thought, or a connection to something else. So that was point number one… I wanted to link out to all of those discoveries online, add in my thoughts, and share them with the small community that passes through here.

Technically that’s something that can easily be done on Twitter or Facebook – but I’d rather people end up here than on Mark Zuckerberg’s site. Point number two was to have this blog as the home for all my links and thoughts. Yes, they would be syndicated out to Facebook and Twitter, and many discussions would happen there, but ultimately my record of things that were interesting to me would be under my control.

That’s not a perfect solution, as it does create the situation where someone intrigued by a post on a social network clicks through to here, and then readers need to make one more click to reach the original story (tip of the hat to @Documentally and others for this observation). I’ll be brutal here, this is my blog and if I can set the rules anywhere on the internet, it’s here.

Finally, there was the schedule. Blogging through 2012 had been sporadic, which had been one of the reasons to sit down and decide “what next”. Point three was to set a timetable for posting, and given the short and sharp nature of posts I decided that I would aim to publish at least one item per day, and more if I felt the urge. Since the year started, I’ve only missed two days… One day in the middle of May (when I was knee-deep in covering the Eurovision Song Contest) and yesterday (while some DNS issues sorted themselves. I’m pretty happy with that strike rate.

One knock-on effect is that the blog is helping me pick up and remember story ideas, because I’m making far more connections as I read online, and my inner voice is coming out a bit more. By collecting more links and more thoughts, it’s easier to skim the best thoughts off the top and work them into longer posts, articles, and reviews on other sites where i write. Which of course I can then link to from here.

And that’s my #Back2blog on how I went #Back2Weblog at the start of 2013.