A few days ago Om Malik blogged about his writing advice, ‘write like a human‘, saying there’s no need for more bland mediocrity like ‘freeze-dried news reports’. Being real will always be as unique as yourself.
It coincided with me rereading something I blogged around this time in 2003, saying ‘blogging is about people first and people only, personal relationships are the stuff of our lives‘.
Om Malik also writes that writing in your own voice means your words will reflect who you are, that there’s no hiding behind fancy words.
I think it is even impossible to hide behind fancy words, or even freeze-dried reporting, the longer you sustain a personal blog. Through the years your blog will always reflect who you are, as your interests move with your own life and experiences, regardless whether you chose to limit yourself to non-personal topics and interests. It is very hard impossible to portray yourself as anything other than you over the course of many years, or not have your self be revealed through your writing during that time. (For instance Peter and Frank have been blogging for 2 decades or more, and I’m coming up on 18 years on this blog.) Even more so if your blogging leads to face to face encounters, repeated meetings a few years apart, and generates distributed conversations. It’s the reason that when a couch-surfing initiative for bloggers was suggested by Henriette Weber in 2005, I added a requirement to my profile there for anyone interested in staying with us would need to have a blogging history of at least a year. It would let me see you, to decide upon your request.
Your blog is your avatar, not in the one-dimensional sense of a profile pic, but in the original sense of a god made flesh in terrestrial form, in the sense of Ultima IV, where your own ethics determined the outcome by presenting you dilemma’s with short and longterm consequences attached to your choices. Your blog is your avatar, a full representation of yourself, made manifest online in HTML texts. Whether you want it to be or not. Time makes it unavoidable.
RT @ton@m.tzyl.nl
Your blog is your avatar. It’s you, made manifest in html texts.
zylstra.org/blog/2020/08/y…
m.tzyl.nl/@ton/104619495…
Introduction
There are a lot of blogs on the Internet, most of them with very few visitors, this blog only gets a few organic visitors per month, and this type of articles are read by handful persons.
Today I stumbled upon Your Blog is Your Avatar post.
And the author is right, when you write publicly, you are exposing you to the public.
Writing for nobody, writing for everybody
As I said, very few people read this blog, and that is the same with almost any blog out there, unless you are a famous person, you will get very few visits on your posts, but as soon as someone looks for you on Google for example, they will get your blog, and everything you have written will appear in front of their eyes. So, you may think you are writing for nobody or almost nobody, but anybody can access your posts, you are writing for everybody
Be responsible with your blog
Now that we know that your blog is your avatar, you need to think how you want to be seen, and just as the author says, you need to write in the same way you act in your real life, the tone you put you in your writings will be perceived as the tone you usually use in person to person relationships.
So, just like Om Malik wrote, you need to Write like a human, just like the human you are, do not try to reflect other personality, as it will be noted.
Some more advice
Write freely
Reflect your real personality
Write about things you are passionate about
Be authentic
If you do that way, you will not have to worry about anything you may have written, as that’s the way you are, and the way you think.
Write like a human, because your blog is your avatar
Dear Friends,
— Ton Zijlstra
He’s not wrong.
Ton’s post is a response to one Om Malik wrote titled Write like a human. The main takeaway is this:
Which brings me to my humble site. I started “posting” in 1991 at university. By “posting” I mean status updates on my finger .plan file. Sadly I never backed it up, but little of my digital life back then still exists. With some CompuServe and other cobweb-y bits in the interim, my first real web site was on the @HOME service one of the Detroit Metro cable providers offered before they and their successor were gobbled up by Komcast. I moved to DreamHost in 2004 (!) and have been there ever since — for a while with some 10 different web sites all dedicated to a different interest of mine.
Last year I made an ill-advised upgrade to this site and lost most of the old posts. Well, they still exist in a backup. But restoring that backup has proved problematic. Next rainy weekend, other things permitting, maybe I’ll restore those old posts.
All this to say that I strongly recommend everyone have their own web presence that is a reflection of themselves, their avatar, as Ton said. My site is like someone who entered the Witness Protection program or is an undercover spy. I kind of like that, but its not a good representation of me now.
Regards,
Paul
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Related
Ton: Your Blog is Your Avatar: zylstra.org/blog/2020/08/y… <— AMEN!
Also see Roland Tanglao’s mention at http://rolandtanglao.com/2020/08/03/p1-your-blog-is-your-avatar/
Thanks for this article, Ton. This picks up a lot of the web spirits from years ago before everybody went into full self displaying mode. I’m glad that there are still people writing and not just looking for the next cheap Likes acting “a life”.
Also I’m very curious about that couch-surfing initiative for bloggers you mentioned but the server doesn’t seem to deliver any more. I assume this project is gone?
yes it’s gone.
Sad Guess it got not enough traction. Or no longer.
A good portion of the workforce has now had a taste of distributed work (I prefer this term to ‘remote work’ which has a connotation of a central location and a number of remote workplaces). And most people, for the most part would like to have an option to work away from the office, as reported in a recent Citi GPS Report — “In fact a survey by Gallop has found that three in five U.S. workers who have been doing their jobs from home during the COVID-19 pandemic would prefer to continue to work remotely as much as possible, once restrictions have lifted.”
We are also seeing a number of bankruptcies and layoffs as a result of an impending recession in most countries. Changing employers and employment situations will affect a significant number of workers in the near future around the world. As organizations rise and fall at a faster rate, workers need to find some stability beyond the corporate walls.
Now that people are working online, it does become easier to connect online. But this is uncharted territory for those used to the comforts of a stable office environment. Therefore, from a distributed work perspective, where communications are mostly online, having an online pied à terre becomes important.
Ton Zylstra likens a personal blog to a person’s permanent avatar. Writing over time makes it impossible to hide one’s true personality. It’s a deep CV or business card — in a world of rapid change — a good place to ensure that your individual attributes are evident.
What was once a requirement for freelancers working online is now necessary for knowledge workers, artisans, and pretty well anyone who wants to, or has to, stay physically removed from their employers or clients. I have likened a blog to social media’s home base but now it is almost every professional’s home base online. With blogs, individuals have control over their blogs and are not subservient to the algorithmic overlords of consumer social media, like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Some may also find that having a blog becomes liberating, building a professional network external to their current employer. In return, companies get people who are much more connected to the world beyond the corporate firewall.
Image from Blaugh.com 2006 (no longer online)
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Wednesday it was 18 years ago that I first posted in this space. The pace of writing has varied over the years, obviously intensively at the start, and in the past 3 years I have been blogging much more frequently again (with a correlated drop off in my Facebook activity to 0), more than at the start even.
This year is of course different, with most of the people I know globally living much more hyper local lives due to pandemic lockdowns. This past year of blogging turned out more introspective as a consequence. In the past few years I took the anniversary of this blog to reflect on how to raise awareness for grasping your own agency and autonomy online, and reading last year‘s it’s so full of activity from our current perspective, organising events, going places. None of that was possible really this year. I returned home from the French Alps late February and since then haven’t seen much more than my work space at home, and the changing of the seasons in the park around the corner, punctuated only with a half dozen brief visits to Amsterdam and two or three to Utrecht in the past 8 months. A habit of travel has morphed into having the world expedited to our doorstep, in cardboard packaging in the back of delivery vans.
Likewise my ongoing efforts and thinking concerning networked agency, distributed digital transformation and ethics as a practice has had a more inward looking character.
Early in the year we completed the shift of my company’s internal systems to self-hosted Nextcloud and Rocket.chat. When the pandemic started we added our own Jitsi server for video conferencing, although in practice with larger groups we use Zoom mostly, next to the systems our clients rolled out (MS Teams mostly). Similarly I will soon have completed the move of the Dutch Creative Commons chapter, where I’m a board member, to Nextcloud as well. That way the tools we use align better with our stated mission and values.
I spent considerable time renovating my PKM system, and the tools supporting it, with Obsidian the biggest change in tooling underneath that system since a decade or so. It means I am now finally getting away from using Evernote. Although I haven’t figured out yet what to do, if anything, with what I stored in Evernote in the 10 years I’ve been using it daily.
This spring I left Facebook and Whatsapp completely (I’ve never used Instagram), not wanting to have anything to do anymore with the Facebook company. I departed from my original FB account 3 years ago, which led to me blogging much more again, but created a new account after a while to maintain a link to some. That new account slowly but steadily crept back into the ‘dull’ moments of the day, and when the pandemic increased the noise and hysterics levels aided by FB’s algorithmic amplification outrage machine, I decided enough was enough. A 2.5 year process! It more or less shows how high the, mostly misplaced, sense of cost of leaving can be. And it was also surprising how some take such a step as an act of personal rejection.
I also see my Twitter usage reducing, in favour of interacting more on my personal Mastodon instance, through e-mail (yay for e-mail) and LinkedIn (where your interaction is tied to your professional reputation so much less of a ragefest). Even though I never dip into the actual Twitter stream, as I only check Twitter using Tweetdeck to keep track of specific topics, groups and interests. This summer I from close-up saw how the trolls came for a colleague that moved to a position in national media. Even if the trolling and vitriol was perhaps mild by e.g. US standards, it made me realise again how there was an ocean of toxic interaction just a single click away from where I usually am on Twitter.
On the IndieWeb side of things, I of course did not get to organise new IndieWebCamps like last year in Amsterdam and Utrecht. I’ve thought about doing some online events, but my energy flowed elsewhere. I’ve looked more inwardly here as well. I’ve been bringing my presentation slides ‘home’, closing my Slideshare account, and removing my company from Scribd as well. This is a still ongoing process. The solution is now clear and functional, but moving over the few hundred documents is something that will take a bit of time. I don’t want to move over the bulk of 14 years of shared slide decks, but want to curate the collection down to those that are relevant still, and those that were published in my blog posts at the time.
I am tinkering with a version of this site that isn’t ‘stream’ (blogposts in reverse chronological order), and isn’t predominantly ‘garden’ (wiki-style pseudo-static content), but a mix of it. I’ve been treating different types of content here differently for some time already. A lot never is shown on the front page. Some posts are never distributed through RSS, while some others are only distributed through RSS and unlisted on the site (my week notes for instance). Now I am working on removing what is so clearly a weblog interface from the front page. The content will still be there of course, the RSS feeds will keep feeding, all the URLs will keep working, but the front of this site I think should morph into something that is much more a mix of daily changes and highlighted fixtures. Reflecting my current spectrum of interests more broadly, and providing a sense of exploration, as well as the daily observations and occurrences.
Making such a change to the site is also to introduce a bit of friction, of a need to spend time to be able to get to know the perspectives I share here if you newly arrive here. I think that there should be increased friction with increased social distance. You’ll know me better if you spend time here. The Twitter trolling example above is a case of unwanted assymmetry in my eyes: it’s incredibly easy for total strangers to lob emotion-grenades at someone, low cost for them, potentially high-impact for the receiver. Getting within ‘striking distance’ of someone should carry a cost and risk for the other party as well. A mutuality, to phrase it more constructively.
Here’s to another year of blogging and such mutuality. My feed reader brings me daily input from so many of you, around the world, and I’m looking forward to many more distributed conversations based on that. Thank you for reading!