Back to blogging

I decided to get back into blogging, since perhaps it’s the only semi-permanent documentation of what we have been socially discussing, academically and otherwise.

I was thinking about what went wrong with blogging, and there are several reasons. The mostly cited ones are a lack of support for RSS and its more widespread usage (after the end of Google Reader), and the rise of social media platforms like Twitter, which are quicker to digest than whole paragraphs. Erick articulates it better than I can, but there are two other personal reasons why I believe I stopped blogging. The first was the volatility of references, and the second was a perceived lack of civility in the comment sections.

I guess we got used to the first one, where links from one year ago are no longer valid, although at that time me, as an academic, assumed that all sentences should be supported by a link (reference needed). Going forward I’ll relax this requirement. A side-effect is that unlike before, we can update blog posts instead of creating a new post just with an addendum. As for the lack of civility, it moved from blog comments to social media. Which on the upside is not a resposibility of the hosting blog to moderate anymore. For personal blogs it does not change much, but now we are more comfortable with blocking, deleting comments, or ignoring trolls even when disguised as sea lions.

I still have some stuff to do, like deciding if I should invest in a blog with jupyter-notebook capabilities (I still have some technical blog posts using the unmaintained fastpages ). Or checking if the RSS gives us the full post —at some point article feeds started forcing you to click back to the original site to read the full content, I guess fitting into my first complaint of volatile content.