I’ve just been really, really, incredibly busy. I see other people giving up on blogging. Like Scoble today, who is most likely doing it for a stunt, like he’s done before with Google+ and Posterous (or as I like to call them, dying and dead). It’s a stupid move.
The only reason I post as much to twitter as I do is because I have a backup of all that data here on this blog. This is my space. It’s my corner of the Internet that I have full control over. It’s not some other company owning everything I post. That’s important. Since we all first started blogging in the last part of the last century, this has been one of the most important parts of what we’re doing here. This is a new frontier. We’re trailblazing it. We have our own voices and no one can silence us.
Giving that freedom over entirely to Twitter or Facebook or any social network is relinquishing that freedom, even if these social networks don’t abuse their power.
“Did you see the blog I wrote on Facebook today?” <–Statements like this make me gag a little. But that’s how popularized blogging has become as a decentralizing form of communication. It was the wild west, and it was powerful, and now it’s popularized and being consumed by large social networks that will eventually die, fade away, or morph into something new that the original users didn’t want (like what Facebook underwent when it first separated itself from Universities, and what FourSquare has recently been through by separating their check-ins from their primary app).
I see tons of discussion about news media and the way it’s all changing and how newspapers are dying and how they’re all trying to become this new form of blogging. Just losing a bit of the editorial overhead you’ve had for years doesn’t make your news source a blog. Being an individual voice, opinionated, speaking in your own space out here on the digital frontier, screaming, whispering, and sometimes being heard and sometimes not with the full freedom to be as right or as wrong as you end up being. That is being a free speaking human. That is blogging. Everyone should do it. Return to it.