The blogosphere
Now with added newsletter-o-sphere
December 30, 2014 — October 20, 2024
Assumed audience:
Nascent producers and consumers of online punditry
Blogging and newsletter authoring for general pundits. Closely related: subscribing to feeds, which is a convenient and natural way to read and interact with blogs. These days there is a fashion for email first blogs because it provides a handy on-ramp for people who do not know how to subscribe to feeds.
A lot of the blog discussion here assumes basic verbal punditry. The technicalities of academic blogging can be a little different; see that page for more HOWTOs on mathematical markup and citations etc.
1 Why
Incorporating why not.
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As you start routing information and putting out blog posts, you will begin to accumulate connections. Useful information will start to stream toward you, turning you into a small hub yourself. This will allow you to collect and curate information and route it back out, which will allow even more people to connect to you, in a flywheel that lets you do increasingly useful and good work. I especially enjoy it when intelligent people attack me; I then invite them to comment on upcoming drafts.
You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet. Pasting your posts there, it is easy to find community when you are starting out; you don’t have to scream into the void.
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Blogging acts as a lighthouse.
Lighthouses are famously easy things to spot. They broadcast their presence far and wide. It’s their only function. Being a lighthouse makes you easier to find, which is to say, it helps advertise your existence to the sort of people you’d like to find.
Ribbonfarm is Retiring is an overview of the blogosphere as at 2024 from someone who was in it for 17 years
2 Static site
What I currently do. See static site.
3 Wordpress
Classic, and I used to use it a lot. Pro: integrates into other things well. Offers both open-source and hosted versions.
4 Email-first blogs
Email subscriptions are useful for enabling people who do not know how to read feeds or like keeping stuff in email.
They are a rough fit for this blog, which never “finishes” anything, but they are popular.
See email blogs.
5 Medium
Pretty blogs. The aesthetic is not mine, and I am irritated by their nagging to register in order to read articles. The community reading features are nice, and they achieved a lot of market share for a while there. I think they have been surpassed by Substack though.
6 Wix
OK I guess.
7 Squarespace
Not a fan of this product. Does not integrate with anything; it is a walled garden. Not especially cheap. Websites look fine but are heavy and menial to create. Suits people who really want to use a word processor that prints to the internet, but also want someone else to own and operate that word processor. That is not me, although some people might be into it and that is OK.
8 Incoming
- ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you.
- Great bloggers are rare, weird, and not team players – Kevin Drum
- How to Monetize a Blog read this to the end, maybe on a desktop browser