where I have ideas about blogging

As Leah and Mike said in an excellent episode of Let’s Make Mistakes, some people don’t care about their blogging tool - they just want to publish content. Others are really excited about new services and platforms and trying new tools helps them write more.

Similarly, Patrick Rhone in Enough said switching between personal journaling apps helps him write more there.

I definitely belong to the second category. I started blogging more when Posterous came out. When Twitter bought it, I was writing less. I tried a lot of different static generators for this website, but for now I settled on using Nesta, which, by the way, isn’t really a static generator.

Did I mention Twitter? I think I did. Twitter definitely sucked a lot of words out of blogging, in part because it has less friction - you don’t have to come up with a title, you just write. Tweets are more ephemeral though, so microblogging can’t replace blogging. We need both current news and timeless thoughts, both short updates and long-form articles. But that’s not why I’m talking about Twitter.

Twitter, and microblogging in general (by which I mean App.net :D), is great for getting people to read what you write. You just follow people, reply to them, they check your tweets out and follow you. This really works! And it works much faster than it used to work in blogs. Not much people clicked the link to your blog in comments on other blogs, right? Now a lot of blogs don’t even have comments, including this one.

We need some other model that will work better for blogs. Tumblr, for example, has adopted the following model and reblogs, but do you see people reblogging long articles? No, you see them reblogging pictures of cats. Tumblr can be used both for blogging and microblogging, and the overlap isn’t big enough.

Well, seems like the best way to get more people to read your blog posts is just getting more people to read your tweets (and submitting your blog posts to Reddit and Hacker News sometimes). It’s not so hard to get pageviews and even some feedback (although HN/Reddit feedback can be pretty useless), but it’s harder to get subscribers who will read your blog and give meaningful feedback.

Speaking of feedback, it can be made more frictionless. A typical comment form has multiple fields. Name, email, website, body. Sometimes even subject. You can auto-fill all that with 1Password or a similar tool, but that still requires clicking. Commenting via email has friction too. There’s the damn subject field. Yes, you can have a mailto link with the subject “Feedback for {{post}} on {{blog}}”. No, it’s still not as frictionless as a reply on a microblogging service. Maybe embed the tweet that links to the post? Closer, but you still have to click the “Reply” link first. I think there should be some form that will post a reply to App.net without clicking “Authorize”, but that would be a CSRF attack :D

Also, I’d like to see better blog aggregation. More like groups on Flickr than blog planets. I.e., more centralized.

Speaking of Flickr, there’s an interesting form of commenting that uses Flickr from 2007. And speaking of friction, I hate photo titles.