I played PUBG with Jeremy last night. It’s been 142 days since I last played. 1) where does the time go? 2) Shows you how much of a gamer I am!???? I like games, but always feel guilty if i whittle away hours playing them. In my head, I keep thinking how many pages I could have read in those hours I spent playing? I know games are important too, but it’s hard to shake the notion that games, while pleasant to play, are time wasting activity.

Which brings me to Monday morning and thinking how can I be ridiculously productive today?

A couple of responses I got back from the crowd:

and

and

Over the weekend, I worked through the question of how to be as close to the open web as possible, and by that I mean how to extract myself from the walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, and use open sourced software and play in places whose business model isn’t driven by algorithms that exploit my personal data?

Micro.blog is one solution. I have a presence there. Also @TheEinarkist recommended Riot (which I’ve yet to sign up for) and PeerTube and Mastodon. I’ll explore all of these at some point. I have set up a micro.blog account if you want to check that out. The community there have been very welcoming so far.

All of this is closely related to my return to personal blogging versus blogging as a content marketing channel for business. The reason I started blogging in the first place was a channel for self-expression. Then the idea that you could make money from blogging kept oozing in through the seams as marketers began to dominate the social web bent on convincing people that even the Average Joe or Jane could quit their jobs and become full-time bloggers. I’ve always been more about readership than money (although a couple of pennies would be nice to pay for hosting and stuff, so click on those darn amazon affiliate links when I post them!). The hook that I always bit on the marketing line was “if you niche they will come.” Not fully realising until now that as a personal blogger, my niche is me!

Personal blogging is blogging about the things you care about and find interesting. And maybe along the way, you’ll bump into people who care about the same things. So that is where I’m at now with all this blogging stuff – writing about the stuff that interests me and connecting with other bloggers who are into the same thing.

Which brings me back to the open web. I’m on a hunt to find other bloggers and such who are outsiders like me. Drop me a link to your blog in the comments.