Jeremiah Tolbert

Hey, remem­ber when we all used to blog?

Let me take you way, way back to 2007. You could still buy and sell a house for exor­bi­tant prices, and there were still banks that would give you loans for that.  You prob­a­bly actu­ally had a job, you know, work­ing for some com­pany that employed real live peo­ple, instead of spend­ing all your time launch­ing small busi­nesses or pol­ish­ing your resume and carpet-​​bombing employ­ers with it.  Twitter was around, but only Left Coast lib­eral elit­ists used it.  Not us nor­mal, real, work­ing Americans! Not blog­gers.  We thought “what in the world would I say in only 140 char­ac­ters?  Give me my Blogger/​WordPress/​Movable Type/​Other!”

Maybe that was just me?

Times changed fast, didn’t they? I picked up Twitter, became a heavy user, and then  2010 became the year that my blog died.  I’m blam­ing Twitter, whether it’s hon­estly respon­si­ble or not.  I have made over 11,000 tweets, but the qual­ity of my blog posts is gen­er­ally higher than my tweets.  Overwhelmingly, my blog has pro­vided more value to my read­ers than Twitter has.  But Twitter is like infor­ma­tion crack.  Need another hit?  Oh look, another 400 updates to your stream.  And writ­ing a tweet takes 1/​100th the effort of pen­ning a blog post.

It wasn’t long after I signed up that I found myself doing noth­ing but Twitter and ignor­ing my beau­ti­ful, inspir­ing, edu­ca­tional, and—above all else—humble blog.  Instead of writ­ing posts that con­nected resources together and shared them in a mean­ing­ful con­text, I tweeted links, some­times with­out any con­text.  Talk about instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion though. People retweet a hell of a lot more than they com­ment on blogs.  You can watch in real time as some­thing funny or clever spreads virally from your friends out into groups of peo­ple you never even heard of with vaguely dis­turb­ing per­sonal pro­file pho­tos. You really get the sense that peo­ple are lis­ten­ing on Twitter.  It’s harder to know when peo­ple are read­ing your blog unless they are com­ment­ing on it or retweet­ing your announce­ment of the post.  Nothing sat­is­fies the need for atten­tion quite like retweets.  They’re dead easy to do, but empty of real con­ver­sa­tion gen­er­ally.  They’re a medium, not a message.

It’s not just what Twitter has done to my shar­ing habits that dis­turbs me.  It’s the way my thoughts them­selves have changed.  For a while now, I’ve felt my thoughts turn­ing much more shal­low, and I can prob­a­bly only blame that par­tially on my heavy use of Twitter.  But it doesn’t take gen­er­at­ing real, actual con­tent on Twitter to get that lit­tle dopamine buzz of atten­tion.  You can just share a link from your Google Reader.  Or retweet some­one else.  I didn’t just become a con­sumer of information—I became a lazy syn­di­ca­tor, with the false feel­ing that I was gen­er­at­ing con­tent when all I have really been doing is shift­ing around some­one else’s con­tent (coin­ci­den­tally, this also describes a bunch of inter­net news sites that will remain unnamed here).

I’m not going to beat myself up about it.  At the same time I was spend­ing more time on Twitter and less time on my blog, I was launch­ing my web design com­pany Clockpunk Studios.  And Twitter has some very large pos­i­tives asso­ci­ated with it.  It has been invalu­able in mak­ing busi­ness con­tacts.  I’ve got­ten more than one client from a Twitter recommendation.

So look, Twitter’s not all bad.  It’s not all good.  It’s just a new thing that I need to bal­ance along with all the other things.  Maybe you’re strug­gling with that too?  Let’s talk about this. Has Twitter killed your blog too?  Head to the com­ments! And keep it civil. If you just want to make fun of peo­ple who use Twitter, find some place else to do it.  Like your own Twitter account!

I’ve sworn to myself—because I appar­ently enjoy mak­ing ridicu­lous oaths to myself—that I would relaunch my blog before the year is out.  The new design is only half done.  You’ll notice an absolutely lack of side­bars.  But we’re gonna focus on con­tent for a while here, and let those other fea­tures fill in with time.

I’m start­ing with this post (which I am writ­ing 5 days ahead of pub­li­ca­tion, as a part of a gen­eral effort to a: spend more time on blog posts, and b: get the con­tent log rolling ahead of me to build momen­tum).  I’ve worked up a ten­ta­tive weekly sched­ule, which will cer­tainly change once I’ve got­ten into it a bit and begin to under­stand what is work­ing and what isn’t.  When I blogged reg­u­larly, I kept a 3 day a week sched­ule, but that would be too easy to slip out of now after being so out of habit.  Regular, daily con­tent gen­er­a­tion is the only thing that’s going to build up my blog­ging mus­cles again.  So here it is:

My New Improved Blogging Schedule!

Monday:  Personal Anecdotes

This is the day you won’t want to miss if you’re really super inter­ested in the day to day of my life as a small busi­ness owner, aspir­ing midlist writer, and some­times pho­tog­ra­pher.  I’ll be dig­ging into my past in these posts with a gen­eral goal of try­ing to under­stand how I became who I am today and how that impacts who I want to become.  Of course, it will all be writ­ten in my trade­mark humor­ous style.  You will laugh, you will cry, and you will won­der why you became friends with such a bla­tant narcissist.

Tuesday: Inspiration

This is where I’ll share the inspi­ra­tional bits of things I’ve col­lected over the pre­vi­ous week.  This will include snip­pets of cool web design, awe­some quotes in writ­ing, cool comic book pan­els, and so on.  Stuff that inspires me to be a bet­ter artist, pho­tog­ra­pher, writer, and human being.  And not only will I share them—I’ll talk about why they inspire me.  The goal here is to get beyond sur­face level thoughts and back into that crit­i­cal think­ing mode that got me through lib­eral arts col­lege with a solid B– average.

Wednesday: Tutorials!

I do a lot of stuff.  Sometimes, other peo­ple want to know how to do that stuff too.  I’ll be writ­ing up var­i­ous cre­ative tuto­ri­als for Wednesdays.  This will run the usual gamut of top­ics, but expect a lot of web­site related stuff.  Your feed­back will guide the direc­tion of these posts, so if there’s some­thing in par­tic­u­lar you want to know about, then speak up.  As a com­ment or on Twitter.  Either way.

Thursday: The Week in Links

I have to give myself at least one easy day!  I’ll run down a list of links of inter­est that you might enjoy that I’ve gath­ered up from var­i­ous resources through­out the week.  I’ll even go a step fur­ther than the old Delicious​.com auto posts and actu­ally pro­vide some con­text to the links!  And they won’t be posted daily, so you’ll prob­a­bly have seen and read every sin­gle one already, but hey, who knows…

Friday:  Lesson Learned

Finally, I’ll look back on the week and talk about a les­son I’ve learned, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on my self-​​employed lifestyle and run­ning my busi­ness.   But I reserve the right to make it lessons I’ve learned in just about everything.

So that’s that.  For now.

It takes remark­able ego to write a blog at all.  My ego’s going to have to grow a lit­tle bit to man­age 5 days a week of hope­fully scin­til­lat­ing con­tent.  But with a lit­tle fer­til­iz­ing in the form of feed­back from my friends and com­plete strangers who clicked through from a Google search for “Yogi Bear foot fetish”, I think my ego will grow and grow until it wins 1st prize at the County Fair.

So here we grow!