Category: Writing

JUST START BLOGGING

Fuck a Square Space, fuck a newsletter, fuck a social media platform and just freaking write, preferabbly on your own domain or least something you pay for so you can export yoru work if it ever goes belly up.

Fuck the full-width photos. Fuck the buttons. Fuck the H2 tags.

We’ve spent hours everyday posting and consuming social media content. Now it’s time to get radical. Reverse thrusters and lock in the auxiliary power. Pull the emergency brake and abort, it’s to get back to blogging.

Every new blog post is a signal to the reader, the curious visitor. There is no confusion, there is no navigation, there is THE FIRST POST.

It’s the menu, it’s the directions, it’s the manual – we start here. Today, this first post. This is where we start today.

Don’t like it? Scroll down, there’s another post. Not for you? Take a hike.

I guess I could say this blog is a failure for not landing me some big giant six figure client or whatever, but I’d say it’s a success because it’s fended off any shit-ass hiring manager from hiring a ding dong like me and that’s fine.

This blog is a signal. This is me. This is what you get. And it’s not ever video!

But the blog serves a purpose. Each post is like an email to the universe, a signal saying “this is what you get.”

Some might be curious and dive in. They might even email you.

Otherwise all those busy, cluttered, slow loading square space sites are just bogged down with static photos, text that was written three years ago, and a bunch of buttons to “sections” where it’s just more of the same.

Fucking write on your blog like your life depends on it because I’m thinking right about now it does.

BLOGGING IS A TRADE

I’m not even sure what part to quote from Alex Danco, but we can start with this:

Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic. My favourite example of this is how Byrne Hobart broke out with his piece on the 30-year mortgage. It’s kind of surprising that this kind of post had such influence – it’s wonky, it’s not written for a general audience whatsoever. But it turns out that people think and talk about their mortgages a lot, and like to feel competent when they do. Reading that piece equips them with a kind of legitimacy to speak on the topic.

This under the header of Blogging is a trade, which I love seeing in the year 2025.

There is power in blogging, in writing, in text.

Everyone can put text on a screen in 2025, but not everyone can write. And if you can write, you’ve got options. From a blog post, to an email, to a text message – so much of it comes from the years blogging, of publishing on the web.

“This is the great secret of writing in public: the writer and primary audience both put in effort (to pack and unpack the idea); and they jointly reap the rewards, which is the legitimacy earned when the idea gets subsequently retold verbally to the wider secondary audience.”

Sadly, in the year 2025, some stupid ideas have won, but the good ideas spread, so it’s time for a lot of us to spread some more ideas. Not thoughts. Not hot takes. But ideas, ways to get out of messes, to move forward, to build a world we want to live in.

EVERYTHING IS A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY

From The Slow Death—and Occasional Resurrection—of Original Reporting:

How We Fix It (a non-complete list)

  1. Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
  2. Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
  3. Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
  4. Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
  5. Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.

Excellent post.

I WRITE TO REMEMBER

From my People & Blogs interview with Manuel Moreale:

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Honestly, no. WordPress and the hosting and such works fine for me. I don’t care much about the name, or the theme, or whatever. The blog is 100% for me.

“I write to remember,” as the lyrics go in ‘One Armed Scissor’ by At the Drive In.

Read the rest here.

BUILD DENSE THINGS

From ‘3 Ways to Amplify Your Creator Gravity,” by Alice Lemee:

LinkedIn posts and Substack notes and Skeets (that’s Bluesky for the uninitiated) are not dense. They extend your reach, sure, but they’re more like your planet’s atmosphere—thin, easily dispersed, and quickly forgotten.

Instead, you need density. When I say dense, I mean something that doesn’t have a 24-hour life cycle and can’t be plucked from the top of your head.

WRITING ISN’T ALWAYS ABOUT US

Writing newsletters can be tough because we think it always has to be us us us…. me me me… look at all the things I got going on! But it’s so fun when we show this world we’ve built, talk about the people in our creative orbit. Tell the stories of how we got where we’re at, and the people who made it possibiel.

HOW TO WRITE ONLINE

Solid advice for writing online, from Sean Goedecke:

  • Try and find opinions you have that lots of people disagree with. Those are the interesting opinions others might want to read about
  • Ideas should come naturally from doing actual work, not from sitting and reflecting on what a good blog post would be
  • It’s OK to write multiple posts about the same thing
  • I deliberately don’t include every caveat – good readers will know I’m only writing about my old experience; bad ones won’t care anyway
  • I try to be upfront about my experience so readers can judge how seriously to take what I’m saying
  • Set up a RSS feed and some kind of analytics

Read more at ‘Writing a tech blog people want to read‘ (via Hacker News).

LOSE THE MAP

As Seth Godin says in his book Linchpin:

“The reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.”

If you want a guarantee, buy a hammer.

Stop looking for tricks. There is no shortcut. There’s no “one size fits all.”

Make a painting, a photograph, a sad song, teach a course, call an old friend, dance like no one’s watching, cuz no one cares more than you do, so you might as well get to it.

START OVER

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

If an unpaid intern could write it, start over.

There are things can could be written by someone else on your behalf – announcing a new product, an upcoming tour, a fancy new something or other.

Lay out the facts. The dates. The logistics. “I’m really excited about this,” you say – gee, really?! Tell me more 😕

There’s enough safe, boring, dry text out there. Throwing chatGPT into the mix makes it even less spicy.

Your creativity is your magic. But please, don’t stop using it when it’s time to talk about the things you’re doing.

I wrote about this in ‘Find social media success by occasionally riding a horse,’ where I say:

“If all you can muster is “I updated my site,” lower your expectations. The algorithms are cruel, but it’s nothing personal. Is this fair or kind? No. But playing this game is a choice, and hardly anybody wins.”

NO GOING BACK

Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):

“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”

Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.

Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).

There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.

Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. 

That’s from Defector (above).

When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.

A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.

Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”

CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.