The value of short and simple blog posts
I value the practice of publishing short and very short dispatches. It’s a kind of microblogging. Early bloggers never differentiated between regular blogs and short blogs and long blogs. It was all normal. The long reads, the medium reads and the micro reads were all just blog posts.
There is some interesting history here. There was the rise of RSS. And then there was the rise of private advertisers and social media.1
And lately I’ve found myself advocating for blogging and microblogging. Microblogging is a loose term. Sometimes it means posts that don’t have titles and other features of full-fledged articles. And sometimes microblogging simply means faster and simpler.
Because. Blog posts for the win. You own them; they’re easy to export and relocate. They archive better. And they contribute to your search traffic. And you don’t have to worry about giving your content away to a company that continues to let holocaust deniers publish and lets other forms of problematic information flourish.
Small things are beautiful too.
Notes
- See this nice summary and a brief history of microblogging (PDF).