To Blog Or Not To Blog?...That Is The Social Media Question...

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 20's, back when I was leaving the TV manufacturing business to get into marketing, back when my wife and I were about to celebrate 3 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, no city, 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 finally to this blog. It had been called the WS Financial Business Update, WS Financial Update, Quietly Working Update, The Patriotism Page, and finally, just The Update.

But here I sit today, looking back over the past three weeks and I am seeing something intersting. My last actual blog post was 16 days go, yet in that time I have shared 15 articles and posts with you all 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 of The Update and all of its forms, how I might contemplate its future as a 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 Twitter posts, especially the ones you forgot to hash-tag. 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 post and forget social media updates.

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 shorter 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 ol' 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 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 did not allowed me to do. 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.