On May 15, 2011, this missive celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Think about that for a second. A decade. Pre-9/11, back when I was in my 20s, back when I was leaving the TV manufacturing business to get into marketing, back when my wife and I were about to celebrate three whole years together, back when my brother was still in high school, oh, and back when I was still living at home with my parents - no mortgage, no association dues, no city dues, no utilities - whatever did I do with my money back then?
So much has changed since the day I decided that the company I had just co-founded needed a newsletter, which over time would morph from a PDF attachment to an HTML email, then ultimately into this blog site. It had many names over the years: the WS Financial Business Update, WS Financial Update, Quietly Working Update, The Patriotism Page, and finally, just The Update. Today, it's just called my blog.
But here I sit now, looking back over the past three weeks and I am seeing something interesting. My last actual blog post was 16 days go, yet in that time I have shared 15 articles and posts on social media.
Now, we all know that a lot of folks are saying that social media is the wave of the future, but to a number of us, especially those who work in technology, social media has already been around for quite some time. So naturally, you can see, as I reflect on the past decade and all of the methods I used for reaching out to folks in my network, how I might contemplate the future of this blog vs. quick and easy links and posts on my social media pages.
There are defintely advantages to the blog. Try to find something you posted on Facebook two years ago. Try to easily search or sort your tweets, especially the ones for which you have forgotten the hashtag you used. Quickly and easily find what you posted on your birthday, or on Fourth of July five, six, seven years ago. The historian and archivist in me shudders at the volume of data that is being lost to the world with these quick and easy posting of links to social media.
Yet, it takes me a lot longer to write the blog posts than it does to simply shell out links to the articles that I have read, though it might take you as the reader longer to read the long articles and less time to read the short articles. We all know that the linked articles are going to have a lot less rhetoric and ramblin' (unless they're Fox News articles) than crazy Old Man Savastano's posts, but at the same time, just a link with even a quick few words from the poster still do not do that person's own opinions justice. And, from what I have heard, my rhetoric and ramblin' tend to make some of you laugh, tend to ruffle some of your feathers, but either way, spark much more of a conversation than a simple link to someone else's article ever does.
Needless to say, a definite decision on the blog vs. social media is not going to happen today. It's Sunday as I write this, and our daily agenda has afforded me the time to write and prepare a post for the next business day, which obviously, the past three weekends' agendas did not allow. So, I guess for now, I'll continue to use social media to point you to the blog and I'll write blog articles when I have the time and simply shell out links when I don't. I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for further signs that it is time to hang up the blog, but for now, it's just not time yet.
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