If you’ve come here looking for the blog I’ve long been writing, my apologies!
The good news: After a long time writing, and thanks to the writing as a process of thinking, my topic got into focus, my niche became clear.
It’s the topic and perspective of “microexploration” I also mention regularly here. And as I decided to get more professional about it, I switched it to its dedicated site:
There, I’m revising my older writing and getting into new explorations – and the topic of life as exploration.
Here, on the site that has my last name as URL, I want to present myself as my personal brand, and allow myself to blog in an older fashion, more personally.
Are blogs still a thing?
It’s a weird thing.
Much of the web now runs (well, gets published) on content systems, oftentimes WordPress, which were originally made to be blogging systems.
They are not blogs anymore, however, as they all got professionalized and monetized into content machines, all designed to draw attention and, through the views, make money from ads.
Since everything is just about getting the eyeballs, it’s becoming more and more common to just let AI do its generative thing and spit out content.
Now, Google says that they still care about the quality of the content, and I’ve done a horrible thing from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint in just deleting the old blog here and publishing revised content bit by bit, without linking from the old to the new.
Probably, it’s even a bad thing for appearing in AI-produced output and being visible that way.
I still write, at least partly, in an old-fashioned way, however: I write online to share thoughts. To at least some extent, I could just as well journal for myself and not make the writing visible to anyone else.
Considering how much commenting is being done only because people misunderstand the writing, take offence with something nobody else notices and the writer never intended – to not even start talking about the problem with personal information versus privacy – I often wonder what good this public writing even is.
And then again, a lot of such writing doesn’t even get seen, let alone commented on, anyways.
Blogs as personal logbooks (How did we ever get to “blog” rather than “plog” from there again?) seem to be gone, subsumed by social media posting.
I don’t care.
I don’t want to be on social media anymore. Their algorithms are even more antisocial than the worst of the heuristics we have in our own brains (which I worry a lot about).
I want to be visible online, however.
Blogging, publishing onilne, I have regularly declared to have been therapy for me.
I wrote, and I write, to think. And I do so online to share ideas, to have the feeling that they would, at least potentially, be out there for others to share in the thinking, see similarities and differences.
Microexploration and other topics of mine will be professional topics, and therefore I want them on their own sites and with less of me and my views in them.
“Just the facts, ma’m!”
Even AI can play its part in that, and help.
All the better in times of so much AI-generated (and hallucinated) content, however, to be visible as an actual human being as well – and here, I have now given myself the space for that.
If you happen to come across this and care, I appreciate it!
And if no one sees or cares about this… it’s still good for me.
(Since this feels like a necessary addendum: If you see this and feel inclined to post something negative, just go away. This is my house.)
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