The “beginning” of my freelance career – The deletion of my forums
So today, I start working freelance from wherever I choose. Aaah freedom…..?
I’ve also removed my forums due to spam-hell. I don’t use them, so there’s really no reason to keep them up at all. Issue your complaints below if you actually give a shit.
Will I now be posting more on this blog? Who the hell knows. Facebook owns my life at the moment. I really have issues coming up with content for both platforms due to the fact that I get infinitely more of an audience on the Facebooks.
Again, if you wish me to produce content here, please let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just keep it to my FB news feed.
No related posts.
The problem is that if you keep it on Facebook, you keep it on Facebook. You might get \infinitely more of an audience on the Facebooks\, but that audience is limited to people you know (and maybe people those people know). That’s all well and good if what you want to talk about is mostly personal. If you are interested in blogging about items of general interest, then moving it outside the world of Facebook might make sense. You have to start writing outside Facebook before you build an audience outside Facebook, not the other way around. And maybe it won’t work; you might blog quite often and never get more than a few regular commenters or a few hundred or thousand hits a month. But you can try.
Really though, it isn’t what I want. It’s what you want. Who is your audience, Shaun? What do you want to write about? What are you trying to achieve with your blogging/writing/content-publishing?
I can tell you why I blog outside of Facebook; maybe that will provide some perspective. I’ve had friends ask me before why I bother having a personal website when \I can just use Facebook\. Aside from the incredible geeky fun that is programming and designing one’s own website, I have a website because it’s mine. It will be there tomorrow and next year, regardless of who operates Facebook and whether they let me continue playing on their servers. Popular things I write will show up on Google for people to find; maybe a post I wrote last year will help someone who had the same problem. I have complete control over what I post and how I post it, right down to the very structure and functionality of the site. I think you understand what I’m getting at here, so I won’t belabour the point. Facebook is a way for me to connect with people I already know; my blog and website are a way for me to tell the world, whether I know them or not, who I am.
I write a blog partly as a personal record of who I am each year (it is both amusing and embarrassing to read blog posts I wrote in 2004) and as a public forum for my ruminations. I don’t think Facebook is particularly well-equipped for blogging. Their Notes feature is anaemic at best (and periodically seems to refuse to import my RSS feed), and like the rest of Facebook’s interface, finding or even noticing notes posted by one’s friends can be difficult. Blogs are mature now. If you want to write longer-form posts, a blog is the way to go.
Choose what works best for your goals. I have not known you that long, and I do not know you all that well, but you always post interesting things in my Facebook news feed. And that makes me curious to hear what you have to say at length, in a more appropriate setting like a blog. For what it’s worth, that would be my vote. But it’s up to you.