Literally billions more people now have a much simpler way to express themselves online thanks to the ease-of-use that is characteristic of any service that seeks to focus on one particularly aspect of communication, a big contrast to a blog’s ability to do anything and everything relatively poorly. It’s fair to ask just what a blog is good for anyway.
This sentence from Ben Thompson's latest Stratechery article rang true on my side. I started blogging back at the end of 2006, over at Blogger. I blogged there for a while, then switched to Posterous for the ease of use of its email-to-post feature. When Posterours was shut down by Twitter, I moved over to Posthaven, where this blog still lives.
Over the course of those years, I tried a lot of other publication services. Facebook, of course. Twitter. Quora. Medium. Each of them offers a specific set of features that makes them for specific use cases. Facebook makes it easy to stay in touch with your friends. Twitter is instantaneous. Quora gives you reach over a specific audience. Medium offers amazing publishing tools.
Yet I find myself coming back to this blog. It's the only place where I can control my identity on the web. I am this blog, and this blog is me. It's the only place where I can control exactly how what I have to say is presented. The domain name is mine. I pay for the service so that I can avoid ads. As it turns out, I'm not the only one feeling this way:
And there, in that definition, is the reason why, despite the great unbundling, the blog has not and will not die: it is the only communications tool, in contrast to every other social service, that is owned by the author; to say someone follows a blog is to say someone follows a person.And that's definitely something no other service will give you.