Blogging for Three Hundred and Sixty Six Days in a Row

Blogging for Three Hundred and Sixty Six Days in a Row

Byrichard

For three hundred and sixty six days I have written a blog post daily. In some cases I wrote two posts, and scheduled the post to appear the next day. This is when I was driving for thirteen hours, or if I knew that my morning was busy. In the process I have definitely given myself a writing habit. The question I ask myself now is whether to continue, or whether to change the posting frequency.


Nothing to Say


One of the problems with posting daily is that we sometimes have nothing to say. We sit at the computer and try to find inspiration for an hour, or two, or even three. Eventually we write but is there any value in what we wrote? According to the viewer stats there isn’t. It’s a matter of just writing, for the sake of habit, and experience. It also demonstrates that I have the stamina to write every single day, even if some days are more interesting than others.


Reducing the Frequency


I’m thinking about reducing my writing frequency to once every two days, or once per week. If I write once per week then I might be as uninspired when I write daily, but weekly. In effect I’d be lazier, less disciplined, than I am at the moment. I don’t think that reducing the frequency of writing would be productive, because that would be about laziness, rather than striving.


Consistency


Writing daily, despite having nothing to say is about consistency. A toddler falls up to several hundred times in a single day when learning to walk. An adult walks 23,000 steps without even noticing, in a single day, when hiking. Writing daily might generate a lot of crap, but it also trains us to write, to type, to think, to go back and edit. It trains us to put ideas into writing. We learn to write every single day.


More Productive than Social Media


One of the reasons I decided to blog daily, is that I saw that Facebook and Instagram were making money from the time I spent on their sites and I thought “I should invest that time into my own site”. I did. That’s why I now blog daily, and I’ve had the habit for three hundred and sixty six days in a row. I do feel like changing the rules for myself.


Photographs and Video


At the moment I post written blog posts, but now that I have written blog posts for three hundred and sixty six days I could change it up. On some das I could post a video, and on others I could post photographs. The point of a photograph is that I could spend 30 seconds on a blog post, rather than one to three hours per day. I proved that I could write daily for an entire year. Now I can reward myself, by changing the rules.


The Road that Became a River


Two days ago I ran by a road that became a river, and I should have stopped to take photos or video. If I had then I could show just how heavy the rain had been, over a period of hours and days. High winds are forecast overnight. It could be fun to capture the waves crashing on shore. If the temperature dropped then it could be fun to capture the ice formation.


And Finally


With the change in format I hope to spend less time on blogging. I want to continue blogging but I want to give myself to post an image, rather than write. Writing takes time.

The Daily Struggle to Find Something to Write About – CloudNeo Shoes

The Daily Struggle to Find Something to Write About – CloudNeo Shoes

Byrichard

For three hundred and sixty two days I have struggled to find a topic to write about. In that time I have, more than once, felt, during my walk, that I had a great idea for the next day, only to deflate the next morning.


On CloudNeo


Yesterday as I was running I considered writing about the On CloudNeo Shoes. They’re shoes that you pay for, monthly, rather than weekly, and you can get them replaced every 90 days. If you browse to the site you will see a count down for when to get them replaced.


They started being so clean and white that I didn’t like having such obviously new shoes on my feet. I don’t like when clothes are so obviously new. I prefer them to have a little more character.


Or maybe I just prefer darker colours on my feet. Light grey shoes are fine. The thing about white shoes, in rainy weather, is that they quickly get caked in mud. Once they’re muddy the’re less obviously new, so they’re more comfortable to run in.


Cost Spread Over Time


The CloudNeo are interesting for two reasons. The first is that they enable you to get running shoes at a monthly cost, and the faster you wear them out, the better the deal you get. The other advantage is that running shoes are often 200-300 francs per pair. That’s a lot to pay for shoes, that, in the end you don’t find comfortable.


Years ago I bought expensive hiking shoes, and I used them in the arctic circle, at first, before using them for hikes, via ferrata and climbing for years to come. That’s right, years. I then bought another pair of hiking boots and they lasted days, or weeks. It’s not the boots that failed. It’s that they were too tight around my ankles and I felt as if my ankles would break if I continued to wear them.


I then bought a cheap pair from Decathlon and these are nice and comfortable. The point is that expensive shoes can just as easily be fantastic, as cheap shoes, so it’s worth trying cheap shoes first.


The Experience


When you get the Cloud Neo shoes they come in a white bag with velcro. You open the velcro, pull out the shoes, and wear them indoors for a bit, to see how they feel. This is because you have 30 days to test these shoes before you’re commited for six months. If you try them outdoors and find they’re uncomfortable then they’ll be dirty and will be recycled, rather than sent to someone else.


When I determined that they were comfortable, walking around indoors, I tried running with them, and they felt okay so I kept them. I’ve been with them for several runs now and they’re fine. My knees don’t hurt as I run with them.


I did notice with normal shoes, after wearing barefoot shoes, that my ankles tend to roll more, especially on rough surfaces. I don’t know whether it’s because the shoes are not stable, or because I lost the habit of wearing normal shoes. In either case I have had to relearn to run, in normal shoes, on uneven surfaces.


I like a little more rigidity in the back. I often find that my heel folds the back of the shoe as I put them on. Other than that I like the shoe laces and I like that they’re light. They’re not weatherproof but they’re so light that if they do get wet it doesn’t matter because they dry without any concious effort.


Minimal Grip So Mud Removal is Quick


The base of the shoes has very basic grip, so if the ground is slippery you’ll know. Some people might see that as a drawback but I see this as an advantage. If you go running through mud, for any reason it takes seconds to clear mud away from the shoes, rather than minutes. Last year I regularly spent 10-20 minutes after every walk clearing the mud from my shoes. With these shoes I don’t need to.


They are aimed at road runners and dry trail running, not muddy or uneven surface running. It’s on roads that you want good padding so they’re well suited to various types of road running.


After 90 days, or when you’ve worn them through, within six months, you can get them replaced and get brand new recycled shoes and start again.


These shoes are made from bio-based resources and the expectation is that you will recycle them every three to six months. They say “You don’t own these shoes, you just use them for a bit, and then return them.


When you get the shoes they come in a white bag with a velcro fastening. Within this bag you have the shoes, but you also have the return address for the shoes. You can send the shoes back, and a new pair will be sent to you.


Recycling Shoes


With conventional shoes you wear them, and once they’re worn out you attempt to get them recycled but they’re counted as bulky recycling so I don’t know what happens to them. With these shoes they’re sent back to their home, they are shredded, cleaned, and then turned into new shoes.


An added bonus to having shoes that are made from “bio-based resources” is that as they get worn down through use, their remains are not harmful to the environment. Mine will, in theory, be ready for recycling in over 65 days from now.


Estimated Cost


If you replace these shoes every three months then they come to about 105 CHF. If you replace them after six months they come to 210 CHF. The faster you wear through a pair of shoes, the more affordable the plan is, but conversely, the worse your habit is for the environment, since shoes require energy to be recycled and reused.


Although they are sold as running shoes I wear them for running and walking. I usually run for a set distance and once I have finished the run I walk. These shoes are okay for both but I don’t like these shoes like I like the Merrel trail glove 7 shoes. If I had this deal for Merrel Trail Glove 7 then I would be very happy. I have been using Merrel shoes for years and I like them, especially since some of them are so cheap, but I wear them out too fast. With a subscription model I wouldn’t worry about how fast I wear them out because I would get a new pair when I needed it.


Children and Shoe Rental


As I write this I believe that a good niche market for this would be children, because children grow out of shoes, before they even wear them out. By renting children shoes you would ensure that children always get new shoes when required.


Side of the Road Walking


The moment when I don’t like these shoes is when I am walking in the grass to avoid being run over by a car driver who doesn’t slow down or take precautions when seeing pedestrians by the side of the road. I feel my feet and ankles twisting at unsafe angles. That’s why I walk on agricultural roads where I know there are very few cars.


And Finally


Running shoes are usually expensive, so paying monthly to spread the cost makes sense, especially if they are replaced every three months. If they’re replaced every six months then they’re much more expensive and the deal is less interesting. You have one month, tho choose to keep the shoes, and then you’re committed for six months, before you can terminate the contract. There is a huge “cancel plan” button, should you decide to cancel the plan.


These shoes fill a niche. They fill the niche of the person who runs 600 kilometres every three to six months and wants their shoes to be recycled, and turned into new shoes. It fills the niche of the person who wears through shoes at a rapid rate. I do, so such a deal is interesting for me, especially if I burn through 600km per three months.


At a rate of 8km per day it would take 75 days to walk/run 600km. This puts me comfortably within the 90 day recycling window.

NaNoWriMo and Blogging

NaNoWriMo and Blogging

Byrichard

November is the month when a group of people try to write 1667 words per day for a month. they have write-in events, word sprints and many other gimmicks to encourage them to break the challenge into less daunting challenges. I didn’t even consider participating this year for a simple reason. This is my 360th day in a row of writing a daily blog post.


The Daily Blog Challenge


My challenge was less ambitious. My goal was to write at least three hundred words per day, every day, without taking days off. I didn’t allow myself to count a photo as a blog post because that would be too easy. I wanted to give myself a productive challenge.


I chose to write a blog post every single day for two reasons. The first is that I grew tired of seeing ads and posts I didn’t care about on Facebook. I grew tired that the time that Facebook was wasting was benefiting them, without benefiting them. By writing a blog post daily I would “waste” an hour or two every single day. Eventually though, that waste of time would benefit me. The first benefit is that every single day for 360 days I have had to stop, think, and write.


Some days I would sit in front of the computer looking for inspiration for an hour or two and find none. This didn’t matter. I always think of something to write. Every day i have a blog post to show for that two or three hours of focus.


NaNoWriMo is 1667 Words Per Day For A month


If you try the NaNoWriMo challenge you have to write 1667 words per day, and you need to try to create a novel, if possible. It is the National Novel Writing Month after all. I like the idea of writing every day, but I hate the idea of writing fiction at the rate of 1667 words per day. It’s my inner censor, that I am not good at controlling. My inner censor, when it comes to fiction writing tells me that it’s crap, and that I should stop wasting my time.


Achieved Once


Quite a few years ago I achieved NaNoWriMo. I reached the daily word count. I enjoyed the writing process but I never had the strength of character to re-read and edit what I wrote, so it lay dormant. Every subsequent time I tried to write a NaNoWriMo challenge my inner censor got me to give up. I don’t have the confidence to participate and achieve this challenge.


If I want to catch up with the NaNoWriMo challenge I would need to write a further 10,000 words today, and that is what I don’t like about the challenge. When you’re working towards such a high word count you waste words and effort. You write, in three hundred words, what you could write in ten.


Imagine going from micro blogging to NaNoWriMo. The contrast is huge.


Fighting the Inner Censor


When you write 1667 words per day you don’t need every word to be kept. The aim is to be verbose so that a week or two down the line you have something to edit, re-write, and re-work. The aim is to let go of the thought that you’re writing crap, and to get ideas on paper. The aim is to spend the next eleven months re-editing everything that you have written, into something that is more interesting, and more worthwhile.


According to WordPress.com I have written 322 posts this year, containing 167,000 words. I achieved this by writing at least three hundred words per day, every single day of this year so far. I like having this daily goal, and habit, and the beauty of this is that it’s a year long project, rather than a one month goal. The habit is part of my daily routine, for several seasons now.


The community is built around a website but events also take place in the physical world, so if you participate you can meet people in person, and write at the same time as they write. This is a challenge where you can expand your social network. A few years ago I went to events but not recently.


NanoWriMo Discounts


Aside from getting into the writing habit, you also get discounts via the website. This means that if you want to use Novlr, Day One, Freewrite, Scrivener or other options you can get a discount. In some cases you get a free year. In others you get a discount.


Complete Freedom


You don’t need to write a novel. You can write e-mails, blog posts, a work of fiction, poetry or anything. In theory you could count anything you write. Writing is writing. Writing daily is writing daily. Fighting the inner censor that says “stop writing junk” is one of the key challenges writers like me had to overcome.


And Finally


One reason for which bloggers should not participate in NaNoWriMo is that the blog post that could have been done in three hundred years gets prolonged and extended, from that quick to read three minutes, to something that takes four and a half minutes to read.

One Hundred And One Blog Posts in One Hundred and One Days

One Hundred And One Blog Posts in One Hundred and One Days

Byrichard

I have written at least one hundred and one blog posts in one hundred and one days. During this time most blogs have gone by unread. Blogging could be seen as futile but it isn’t. Having the discipline to write every single day, despite having no inspiration is good. It forces us to stop, think, and develop inexistent ideas.


In different times I would not write one hundred and one blog posts about nothing but we’re in a pandemic that is being ignored by the people with the power to get us out of it. This means fewer conferences, fewer meetings with people to do sports activities and more. It means less freedom to find covid safe work. It means living with the constant risk of getting long COVID. Switzerland is living in denial about the pandemic and this is frustrating.


The Swiss radio and television removed COVID from their news site. They don’t even keep it as a tribute to the last three years. For them the pandemic is over. You watch the news and you see no masks, no safety measures. Nothing.


Not Waiting For Inspiration


If I waited for inspiration then the blog would be dormant, as it has been for the last decade and a half. It would be updated when I do something out of the ordinary. It would be updated for an interesting bike ride or an interesting walk. It would document an interesting idea, or event. Instead it is about the thing that inspires me enough to write three hundred words


The Stereotypical Blog


Recently I was looking for books about blogging and they’re all about the same thing. Monetisation. They’re all about making money, rather than about exploring and developing ideas. They are all about financial gain rather than idea development. If I found a book about blogging to share ideas and experiences, rather than to make money, I would be tempted. A blog should be about sharing and developing ideas.


Blogging as an Investment


Social media today is about the ego of the people who own the companies. Twitter has become a chaotic mess that sold for 44 billion. Facebook is a social network that used to be about friends and friendships until Zynga ruined the experience for everyone. Instagram was great, until it was bought by Facebook and turned into a glossy mag that promotes influences, rather than human beings. Before you tell me off, I posted more than three thousand images over a period of years. I stopped using it because it made me feel lonely.


Blogging is a worthwhile social media replacement because we generate content for our own blog site. We practice writing, and if we get enough traffic then we can generate a small revenue. If we’re going to spend time on the world wide web then we might as well do something that benefits us personally. As I have said plenty of times, social networks forget that ROI should be about generating value for users, not just for corporate interests. Blogging does provide ROI for the user, me.


Social media was about community, but with time, and algorithms, community has been destroyed. It is now a shouting match. I like blogging. I try to write positive blog posts. It takes effort to be positive. The natural instinct is to write about what bothers me, rather than what I enjoy.


And Finally


Blogging is about taking half an hour to an hour and a half to think, and to develop the ideas I think about. It’s like going for a walk, where the steps are taken by my fingers. It’s a moment to turn inwards. I will continue this habit.

Learning By Writing despite GPT

Learning By Writing despite GPT

Byrichard

I am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. “Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”


At the time this seemed stupid and a waste of time. Years later I think that we could have been taught to take summarised notes rather than literal notes but that isn’t the point. The point is that learning is as much about writing as it is about understanding the material Every day for weeks in a row I have taken the time to write a 300 word post and it’s difficult. Not only do you need to come up with an idea but you need to develop it into something that is at least three hundred words long.


In my opinion chatGPT is going to lower the quality of people’s ability to write, by doing the writing for them. The process in and of itself is the learning experience. You don’t learn by typing a term in a search engine and reading. You learn by thinking of something, and then putting it into words. You learn by trying to write, finding that you have knowledge gaps, and then reading more, before returning to the document you are working on.


The notion that you can get AI to write essays. academic papers, articles and more, is destructive.It is destructive because writing is a skill that is learned through practice. Writing requires us to learn how to think, elaborate, and then make clear. Writing is about elaborating ideas, and rewriting, to make those ideas clear to understand.


Writing is a conversation that you can have with yourself. There is a lot to be gained by writing, rather than getting AI to write.


I love technology, and I love when it can replace boring repetitive tasks, such as entering data into a database and more. I like when it takes data from a form, and places it into a database.


What I hate about tech like chatGPT is that it is designed to replace human beings with artificial intellgence. It is about generating revenue for shareholders, without thinking of the humanity that is lost by doing away with human writers.


One of the reasons I don’t like YouTube, blog farms, Buzzfeed and other sources of “news” is that they have clickbait headlines and rubbish content. We need humans to write content that we read because human written articles are personal. AI is cold.


Recently tech giants, that doubled their profits from one year to the next, with billions of dollars in cash, or at least savings, fired thousands of people, not because they were running out of cash, or struggling to survive, but because they had to maximise profit, not for the human staff, but for the shareholders.
It didn’t end there. Even the execs are taking pay cuts. We live in an age where companies are making billions, or even trillions in profit, and yet the money only flows one way. If a company is profitable it should be investing in staff, giving them better conditions and making sure they stay.


Instead companies are making record profits, to pay dividends, rather than staff.


We are living in affluent times, but the wealthy benefit whilst the rest of society lives in insecurity. That’s why technology like chatGPT worries me. We live in an age of enormous wealth, but it is being funnelled out of society, into offshore accounts, never to be seen again.


And Finally


Remember “The medium is the message” and “The manufacturing of consent”. If AI, rather than individuals write what we read, then those who control the technology control how we think. Read Mindf*ck and look at how FaceBook played with our emotions. Look at who has bought into chatGPT and you will see why I do not like or trust this technology.


I love tech, when it is developed and controlled by moral, rather than corrupt people.

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

Byrichard

Time for a new discussion to take place. Reading time. Do you read through articles or do you skim them. Is reading the headline enough or do you read every word of the article? I ask because in the age of chatGPT and GPT3 I would ask the same question as I asked about social media.


If you want to discuss ROI for businesses and PR firms or advertisers then you need to discuss ROI for users too. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter wanted to control the timeline by using a “home” feed. The Home feed is an algorithm driven feed that shows you popular content, rather than content by friends, that you and they would converse about. The result is a lonely social media experience. The ROI goes down, That’s why I took a break from Twitter to play with Mastodon and revive my blogging habit.


Now we’re coming to the new discussion, about chatGPT. From the tests I have run with chatGPT it is a glorified encyclopaedia rather than AI. It spits out predetermined answers, rather than showing signs of learning and logic. I played with Copperman years ago, and other projects. With those, the more you chatted with the app, the more intelligent it would become. With chatGPT it always gives standard responses. It’s boring. It has no humanity. It has no character.


Writing is a creative process. You sit there, knowing that you want to create content but you need to spend time thinking of ideas, and then you need to write to the word count that you, or others has set. That process injects humanity into what you write. It also means that someone has taken the time to develop an idea, and maybe even proofread it.


By making it easy to generate content for WordPress and other platforms chatGPT, GPT-3 and other technologies are making it harder to find content worth reading. One of the biggest challenges when looking for content., reviews and information about products is the spam. the boiler plate content that people generate for a Casio watch, or other products.


Content should be written by humans for humans. The more noise we generate by fake AI, the more difficult it will be to find human content, by humans, for humans. That fake AI will also create formulaic answers to specific questions, rather than original content.


I love technology when it replaces the need for humans to do boring and repetitive tasks that can be automated, but something creative, such as writing we should keep humans. One tech mag recently allowed AI to write articles and those articles then had to be proofread and corrected by human editors.


ChatGPT is Hype


Recently I was reading a book about AI and deep learning and it wrote about how there is a cyclical habit of people to say “this is a great step forward in AI” only for interest to flare up, and then die down again as the miracle solution is understood and interest wanes again. chatGPT might seem exciting to some, but to me this looks like a human language search engine, rather than proper AI. Give it random words and it doesn’t do anything. I asked chatGPT “how fast does a squirrel run and it crashed, twice. It isn’t intelligent.

Ninety Five Days of Blogging In A Row

Ninety Five Days of Blogging In A Row

Byrichard

I have managed to neutralise the inner censors. I have accomplished ninety five days of blogging in a row, once again. During the first 100+ days of the pandemic I did the same. At the time I thought that this would provide a document of how life was for the pandemic. The pandemic has lasted over 540 days and I eventually lost inspiration, and inspiration for new things to write.


This is a longer challenge than NaNoWriMo because it lasts for 95 days so far, and it has no end day. I don’t need to write three thousand words a day. I don’t even need to write three hundred words a day. I write this arbitrary number of words each day because I read that it’s better for SEO. The truth is that I don’t get any visits for most posts.


Consistent Writing


The point of blogging every day is to train oneself to sit in front of a blank text box and write. Some days the words will flow, and other days they will fall over each other and dam up the river of inspiration. This doesn’t matter. Writing doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be consistant.


My goal, and my hope, is to get myself into the habit of sitting down at a notes app, text document or other, and be able to write something interesting, without worrying. I want ideas to flow. I can edit later.


Amazon’s Mediocre Internationalisation Efforts


By changing from Amazon.de to Amazon.fr I have a new selection of books. I grew tired of using amazon.de because it is so hard to search through for English books. By using Amazon.fr I have found that there are numerous books about hiking in France, and Europe. This is great, because I spend a lot of time reading about hiking, for hikes that I would not do. Those that are in Europe are just a train journey away, and that’s good. It means it is realistic to try them. Especially the short ones.


We are going into the cold, dark months. The days of long nights, and short days, of fog and clouds. Now is a good time to retreat indoors and read and find inspiration for next summer. The probability that the pandemic is over by then is low, but we can always pretend to be optimistic. I will blog about the books, either individually, or as a group, when I get through one or more.


And finally


It finally feels like Autumn, at least for today. The rivers are still empty so we still need a lot of rain. At least for one day Switzerland felt like it had seasons.

Blogging And Digital Minimalism

Byrichard

Blogging and Digital Minimalism are related. Blogging is about finding a topic and focusing on it for an extended period of time. Social media has shifted from being a conversation between individuals to one where personalities broadcast, and their audience is ignored.


When I saw an article, read a book, or had a thought I would tweet or write one or two sentences and post it to Facebook or Google Plus. When social media was about private conversations between individuals, and when no one was making profits of billions from our habits it made sense. Today using social media is about wasting our time, while others benefit, without benefiting ourselves.


I started to read Digital Minimalism. He and others argue that our digital habits are about addiction rather than about feeling that we are connected with others. In the age of the car and the commuter, it makes sense for us to use digital devices to connect with others. Neither Facebook and Instagram nor Twitter have this at their core anymore.


Social media was a distraction from working on projects because it was a means by which to connect with others. Now that this is no longer the case we can revert to blogging and other projects.


Recently someone joked that no one reads blogs anymore. The value of a blog post is not derived from whether someone reads it, likes it or shares it. The value of the blog post is in taking half an hour to two hours to focus on a specific topic. It is an investment.


Returns on Investment


Focus: By writing a blog post you go from skimming through dozens of tweets a minute to thinking about a single topic for minutes or even hours. You go from skimming to thinking. Some journaling apps ask if you want to count the time you spend writing, as mindfulness minutes, I.E. meditation.


Writing: Writing for half an hour to two hours every day trains you to come to a blank page and fill it. You need to be creative or inspired. Shifting from copying a link, writing a sentence or two for Facebook or Twitter, and then sharing it is easy. You can repeat it countless times an hour. Writing a blog post, especially three hundred or more words is a challenge. That’s why it has value. Blogging is a skill. Through daily practice, you improve both your confidence and your ability to generate written content.


Editing: The more I write, the more time I have to think about form and style. When I run out of inspiration I go back over the previous paragraph and I re-work sentences and phrases, tightening them up and making them clearer. As writing becomes easier, so more time and attention is devoted to quality control. The result is a higher quality of content.


Ambition: Spending time on social media is passive. You read and comment on the work of others in short bursts. Blogging requires people to have the focus and self-confidence to write, edit, and then share long-form content. On numerous occasions, I have written blog posts and never shared them. This is either because I ran out of inspiration halfway through or because it was not positive enough.


Consistency: Nanowrimo and other projects teach you to be consistent for a week, a month or an extended period of time. Blogging fulfills the same role. It’s about having the discipline to sit and focus on a regular basis and write. It’s about training yourself to think about what you’re going to write tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It’s about developing the habit of inspiration.


The Journey


Blogging, for me, is a way of reaching the goal of Digital Minimalism. By writing a blog post and focusing for an hour or two, I produce a tangible product. By taking a picture during a hike, bike ride or other activity and writing a blog post I am investing my time. If I had allocated the same amount of time to social media I would have nothing to show for it.


Having said this Digital Minimalism is a concept I am not familiar with so expect a different perspective shortly.

Of Twitter Threads (mice) and Blog Posts (Humans).

Byrichard

With the sentence “Of Twitter threads (Mice) and Blog Posts (Humans)” you’ll see that I’ve done two things. The first is that I’ve modernised a well-known book title to draw parallels with the practices of writing Twitter threads and blog posts.


People write twitter threads because they think that it’s fast, convenient, will draw an audience and it’s trendy. It keeps people within the same site. No browsing between platforms and websites. There is the notion that people do not want to leave the social networks where they find themselves. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are portals, except that once you’re inside your trapped.


The beauty of writing threads is that it’s easy. You only need two hundred characters per tweet. You don’t need to develop and justify your ideas as you would with a blog post. Twitter threads are fleeting. Within a few minutes, they’re gone.


Blog posts, in contrast, requires your inspiration to last. You look at that empty window and you see an insurmountable challenge. You see three hundred words as a challenge not worth attempting. That’s how I often feel about blogging, and that’s why I usually write after a day of sports or other activities. It’s easy to write when the story exists and you’re just remembering it.


By blogging rather than writing twitter threads you’re pushing yourself to learn to write. The more you write the more ideas flow, and the more ideas flow the easier it is to go back and edit. The fear of the blank page dissipates, as does the lack of consistent inspiration.


Another feature of writing a blog post rather than a twitter thread is that you have time to think. There are no updates, no “press to refresh” and other distractions. From the moment you start to write until the moment you run out of momentum you are focused.


The length of my blog posts, and the quality of my writing have improved. I’m taking longer and longer breaks from social media. I’m reverting from a distracted individual who doesn’t follow curiousity to one that explores more.


If you’re worried about being distracted then reading twitter threads will not resolve this issue. You read two or three posts in a thread and see a reply that will take you in another direction, before returning to the original stream of thought.


Contrast this to a blog post. If, and when you skim Wordpress and other websites you’re seeing each post and their description before clicking and reading that post for a few minutes. You are fully engaged with the message that the writer wants to share. You then share that post, and people will read it as easily as you did.


Jaiku had threading, but similar to bulletin boards. Twitter’s algorithm fed threads promote the people and threads that make noise without anyone conversing, rather than the other way around.


If you’re inspired and have something to say then blogging is a fantastic avenue because as you’re learning to write with a voice there is a small audience, and as your voice gets stronger, and as your writing improves, so will your audience. In contrast, writing twitter threads gives the illusion of being a writer. You’re getting the attention, but writing snippets.


There is an exception to that rule, of course, poetry. If you’re a poet, and I am not, then Twitter might be an excellent avenue.

Twitter Threads and Blogging
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Twitter Threads and Blogging

Byrichard

Twitter threads and blogging are both free but whereas with one you need to click to read the continuation and it’s hard to print the other is self contained and easily shareable.


I see twitter threads, that as twitter threads are a waste of time on a conversational channel but would be ideal for a blog post. Imagine that you combine two or three tweets. That length would justify a blog post.


Blog posts can be of any length but ideally they should be three hundred words or more. In the case where a twitter thread has three or more points it would perfectly justify a three or more paragraphs post.


With a blog post you can source and give examples of the point you are trying to make and you are not limited to a specific number of characters. You don’t need to run a sentence from one tweet to the other.


You can also add images, documents and more and add headings and more. If you often feel the desire to write threads you could even take up blogging again.


Your blog posts can be written with a mobile phone at any time of day or night and from anywhere. I mention this because with the unreliability of newer Mac book pros mobile phones become a more tempting proposition.


I deleted twitter from my mobile phone because the signal to noise ratio is so high that it is no longer a social tool. It is used like RSS and the conversation is uni-directional. Do you really want your train of thought to compete in such a noisy environment?


The blogosphere is just as noisy as twitter but with one key difference. People who read blog posts are looking to invest their time rather than scroll mindlessly. We might as well take advantage of that.


I saw an image on Facebook that said that we need to keep our social media appropriate for good mental health. I’m suggesting that we take it a further step and skip social networks like Facebook and twitter and start conversing via blog posts again. Let’s re-allocate the time that we devoted to social media to self owned blogs and platforms where we go to learn, share and be creative.


I still love blogging because the aim and the challenge is to find just one idea to write about daily. It’s easy to write 20 tweets and post twenty thoughts a day to Facebook. It’s much harder to write one blog post a day. The challenge is good. We gain in creativity, self discipline and focus.


Next time you’re tempted to write a twitter thread stop yourself and write a blog post. It will take the same amount of time but your audience will be more engaged, eventually. Give your ideas the treatment they deserve.