Meta weeknotes: blogging and newsletters
I've been writing weeknotes for several months. "Weeknotes" partly to force some discipline on myself, to think and reflect before everything falls out of my mind again. Partly to try to indicate that they are just scrappy notes, on a variety of topics, based on what I've read/seen/discussed in the last week (or so) - they are not deeply considered articles with beginning, middle and end.
Maybe this is not what others mean by weeknotes. Phil Gyford writes this week about the current era of blogging:
I have wondered a few times recently - especially when, to my surprise, other people refer to things I've written or suggest I might be a useful source of information - if I should be doing something else. Trying to write coherent pieces on specific topics. I guess part of the reason I don't is that I don't have An Opinion on many things. I am not good at Hot Takes. (I am not sure I believe in Hot Takes - creating and responding to them seems a peculiarity of a certain set of people in some sort of media / think tank / something bubble, and I can't see how anyone with a job of actual work to do which doesn't involve hot takes can actually spare the brain power to engage with them.) Slow takes would not be much better. On most of the things I write about I am slowly learning, and even more slowly figuring out what I think. What little opinion I have is changing over time and I rarely feel confident in it. If I had more time, perhaps I could identify topics where I have enough content to write a whole thing about them. It takes long enough to digest a week of things, without making it all coherent.
There's something about who is reading and when, too. Blogging is partly useful because I do not know who I am publishing for. (I am writing to force myself to think... the publishing is really for accountability to myself. But that's partly because I can imagine readers...) Future me? People vaguely interested in some overlapping set of topics? Sharing in the open means I don't need to worry so much. Perhaps people will find the content, find it useful, at some unspecified point in the future. In that context it doesn't matter that it's bitty - bits can still have value. But bits can also be misinterpreted; and long term, assuming I am publishing in places with some longevity, perhaps these scrappy notes will look ill-considered.
Newsletters seem to be popular these days. Craig Mod has an essay out this week on the subject. There are many tools; anyone can read newsletters, assuming they do email. It's also something you can make private, or use as an incentive for a payment scheme such as Patreon.
I can see something in the idea of a newsletter as more transient - perhaps a match for my illformed weekly thoughts. But personal newsletters have always felt somewhat egotistical - really, who wants to hear from me? This feels even more the case as I work at the intersections between things - I would not be producing one of these very focussed newsletters on a single topic. Also, the content, being transient, won't help unknown people in the future, who might find value in it. One of the first blogs I began reading was Status-Q, and Q often posts things that may turn out to be useful to people in the future; perhaps this influences my thinking, here.
To come back to a line of thought, what about pace of reading? Newsletters obviously arrive in your email inbox; possibly a place for considered reading, but also possibly a place for hurried archiving or deletion, or a quick skim. Where do people read blog posts? I share links to mine on Twitter and LinkedIn, and so I assume many readers will be clicking there, from a social flow context; perhaps that means shorter posts of bitty content are a match for their reading state? I am so retro I use an RSS reader, and whilst I do skim some of that content I go there expecting to read longer pieces at a more leisured pace than Twitter. (I spend quite a bit of my Twitter time opening links in browsers or saving them for later, because I'm in a skimming frame of mind.) Perhaps some people "follow" me on Medium and find my posts there?
All of this assumes broadcast mode - what about responses? I occasionally get "claps" or comments on Medium; and close to no comments on Blogger. I do get messages and emails from people who read my posts, though.
On balance, blogging feels like it's still the right thing for the sort of writing I'm doing. I struggle to imagine getting motivated to reflect and write every week or so for a known audience of a handful of newsletter subscribers. (Some of those possible subscribers are keen, though. Would you support a Patreon, or similar, if I had one? Answers on a postcard, as they used to say.)
(Also, I'm posting in Blogger native and copying to Medium this week. Medium, for all the beautiful presentation, just seems less and less useful as they enforce the cap on articles you can read if you aren't a member. I don't have a clear sense of audience but I'm pretty sure anyone reading this is unlikely to be a Medium member. So open publishing first, albeit with a surveillance business model.)
Maybe this is not what others mean by weeknotes. Phil Gyford writes this week about the current era of blogging:
So, first, the environment for blogging has undergone several changes over the past couple of decades. The audience is different now. Way, way back I only felt that “people like me, and who are online” would read anything I wrote, and that was a small subset of “all people”. Blogging on a public blog felt more private than it is now, separate from the “real world”. Whereas today I’m well aware that anyone could read this nonsense.and he mentions weeknotes:
At the moment I feel that, for one segment of the complex Venn diagram of bloggers, blogging feels more professional than it used to be, and I wonder if weeknotes are part of that. (Here are lots of people I don’t know writing weeknotes.) I’m not saying weeknotes are a bad idea — I like writing them myself — but they feel somehow more “respectable” and “professional” than frequent, irregular blogging. A vague aura of regularity, a public face, things achieved, a respectable “brand”.Well, that's not how I am treating weeknotes - as mine are mostly not about the things I am paid to do. Perhaps I am doing it wrong.
I have wondered a few times recently - especially when, to my surprise, other people refer to things I've written or suggest I might be a useful source of information - if I should be doing something else. Trying to write coherent pieces on specific topics. I guess part of the reason I don't is that I don't have An Opinion on many things. I am not good at Hot Takes. (I am not sure I believe in Hot Takes - creating and responding to them seems a peculiarity of a certain set of people in some sort of media / think tank / something bubble, and I can't see how anyone with a job of actual work to do which doesn't involve hot takes can actually spare the brain power to engage with them.) Slow takes would not be much better. On most of the things I write about I am slowly learning, and even more slowly figuring out what I think. What little opinion I have is changing over time and I rarely feel confident in it. If I had more time, perhaps I could identify topics where I have enough content to write a whole thing about them. It takes long enough to digest a week of things, without making it all coherent.
There's something about who is reading and when, too. Blogging is partly useful because I do not know who I am publishing for. (I am writing to force myself to think... the publishing is really for accountability to myself. But that's partly because I can imagine readers...) Future me? People vaguely interested in some overlapping set of topics? Sharing in the open means I don't need to worry so much. Perhaps people will find the content, find it useful, at some unspecified point in the future. In that context it doesn't matter that it's bitty - bits can still have value. But bits can also be misinterpreted; and long term, assuming I am publishing in places with some longevity, perhaps these scrappy notes will look ill-considered.
Newsletters seem to be popular these days. Craig Mod has an essay out this week on the subject. There are many tools; anyone can read newsletters, assuming they do email. It's also something you can make private, or use as an incentive for a payment scheme such as Patreon.
A lot of this newsletter writing is happening, probably, because the archives aren’t great. Tenuousness unlocks the mind, loosens tone. But the archival reality might be just the opposite of that common perception: These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post. More robust than an Internet Archive container.
I can see something in the idea of a newsletter as more transient - perhaps a match for my illformed weekly thoughts. But personal newsletters have always felt somewhat egotistical - really, who wants to hear from me? This feels even more the case as I work at the intersections between things - I would not be producing one of these very focussed newsletters on a single topic. Also, the content, being transient, won't help unknown people in the future, who might find value in it. One of the first blogs I began reading was Status-Q, and Q often posts things that may turn out to be useful to people in the future; perhaps this influences my thinking, here.
To come back to a line of thought, what about pace of reading? Newsletters obviously arrive in your email inbox; possibly a place for considered reading, but also possibly a place for hurried archiving or deletion, or a quick skim. Where do people read blog posts? I share links to mine on Twitter and LinkedIn, and so I assume many readers will be clicking there, from a social flow context; perhaps that means shorter posts of bitty content are a match for their reading state? I am so retro I use an RSS reader, and whilst I do skim some of that content I go there expecting to read longer pieces at a more leisured pace than Twitter. (I spend quite a bit of my Twitter time opening links in browsers or saving them for later, because I'm in a skimming frame of mind.) Perhaps some people "follow" me on Medium and find my posts there?
All of this assumes broadcast mode - what about responses? I occasionally get "claps" or comments on Medium; and close to no comments on Blogger. I do get messages and emails from people who read my posts, though.
On balance, blogging feels like it's still the right thing for the sort of writing I'm doing. I struggle to imagine getting motivated to reflect and write every week or so for a known audience of a handful of newsletter subscribers. (Some of those possible subscribers are keen, though. Would you support a Patreon, or similar, if I had one? Answers on a postcard, as they used to say.)
(Also, I'm posting in Blogger native and copying to Medium this week. Medium, for all the beautiful presentation, just seems less and less useful as they enforce the cap on articles you can read if you aren't a member. I don't have a clear sense of audience but I'm pretty sure anyone reading this is unlikely to be a Medium member. So open publishing first, albeit with a surveillance business model.)