Especially now that so many social networks are courting you with frictionless sharing. And the question of RSS readers is top of mind.
Seriously, aren't there quick grunt-like posts you can do on Twitter? Schedule all your links to post automagically. Scan titles and headlines, hit a "like" and you're done. Finito. And in real time. That was easy!
Except for they are your breadcrumbs, your digital legacy, your chance to shape a conversation (even when you feel it's just with yourself), your gift to the world (even when that world is only a handful people who barely have time to read, not comment).
Providing a frame of reference, composing thoughts in an open forum like a blog, publishing a point of view, are more than merely a way to develop a personal channel for getting the word out on what matters in your world.
Stand for something and work on backing it up over time.
Why bother at all with blogs
They are an opportunity to shape a conversation about topics that matter right now — whatever we call this moment, whether the age of conversation, or real time something, or collaboration, the path to useful is a path to usefulness.
Sticking with topics also allows you to explore ideas and develop new thinking. In most cases it goes beyond that. A blog helps you keep track of what you said about how something would develop. And that is incredibly useful to understand how you got to where you are today.
Among early blogs were tools for note taking to document and remember things, whether for sharing or not, for example travel journals.
Open access
The search box at this blog is mostly inadequate in helping you find what is most useful to you among the topics I've covered in the archives. I find it hard to retrieve links to posts I know I have written! That will be one of the first features to change over the summer.
At 2,178 posts and approximately 2.5 million words, the archives of this blog are filled with tips, lessons learned, and execution ideas born out of experience and peer discussions. Topics amply covered years before the volumes of books on social business started hitting all networks.
I created landing pages to help organize earlier content and worked on summarizing and reframing curated versions of series of posts to illuminate the connections. For example, is this a good time for listening?
While I believe that RSS Feeds are still a major way to publish and pull content, I'll be working on organizing the existing content for better findability. To overcome the limitations of the current tools using creativity and data — to prove and disprove theses. As I wrote in a recent update on filters, discovery is both about people and content.
And it's the relationships and connections that make content work.
So the question to ask is not why on earth would you still bother with blogging?
The question to ask now is where do we go from here?
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at
conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a
speaking engagement click here.