Getting meta on you for a second.

One of the things I’ve been working on of the past couple of weeks is my blogging workflow. Admittedly I’ve been focusing on the Newsletter (which, by the way, if you haven’t signed up for it, you should. I’ve renamed it Eclectically Curios to reflect where I’m going with the whole “learn something new everyday” motif). I’m 23 issues in and feel relative happy with the direction it’s taking.

Now to integrate the newsletter and the blog…

Because, despite all of the rhetoric about blogging being dead, I believe the blog is alive and well – for some. And yeah, while the good old days of personal blogging, where everyone pretty much just bled their hearts out onto the screen (they do that on social media now), may be gone, blogging is not dead, it has just evolved.

And I believe it’s about to evolve again as more and more articles and blogposts are throwing the question out there, is social media dying? Plus a number of high profile bloggers back in the day, who jumped ship for social media, are now hinting at returning back to personal blogging in attempt to recapture the blogosphere of the late 90’s early 2000’s.

Of course there is talk that people are turning to closed networks on platforms like WhatsApp, which last year broke the 1.5 billion active monthly users mark. And there are others like Messenger and Telegram, and for the more techie, security caution types, there’s Wire. Of course, being the geek I am, I have a presence on all of them.

I like the questions and conclusions that long-time blogger, Jason Kottke lays out:

Maybe we need to ask ourselves, what was it that we wanted from the blogosphere in the first place? Was it a career? Was it just a place to write and be read by somebody, anybody? Was it a community? Maybe it began as one thing and turned into another. That’s OK! But I don’t think we can treat the blogosphere as a settled thing, when it was in fact never settled at all. Just as social media remains unsettled. Its fate has not been written yet. We’re the ones who’ll have to write it.

Ok, so back to the blogging newsletter things. Knowing that I have limited time (don’t we all), I have to sort out how the blog and the personal newsletter play nicely together without either taking up too much time and the other dying of neglect.

My thinking at the moment is to have the personal newsletter take the lead role and the blog, the supporting role. I haven’t quite worked it out completely, but my initial thoughts are the newsletter is a more personal link from me to you, while the blog is my Internet interface, where, like Rome, all of my connections lead to.

Anyway, that’s the state of affairs for whatever this is that I’m doing.

By the way, I’m writing this in MarsEdit 4.0, a web editing app that allows my to create my posts on or offline. I’m trying it out as a part of nailing down my workflow. The two main features that I like is the ability to compose blogposts in something other than the browser or copying and pasting from Word. The other neat feature is the Safari extension that lets you create a post from an article i’m reading, like what I do with the Revue powered newsletter. That should save me a load of time in my seek, sense, and share mode.