One of the things that’s been weird about the 2010s was how all of us who used to blog a lot stopped and transferred our content to places like Twitter. I mean, I also spent time on Tumblr and other experimental networks. But the point is, I stopped writing on my own content platforms.
The reason for this is mostly a good one — I changed roles, ascended and changed careers to some degree — and it was just easier to stop owning my own content at a certain point. Also, a few years ago, I reached a point where I felt like I’d run out of things to say.
Conference talks, interviews, and other ways of sharing information were good for me. It gave me a chance to gain new inputs, while listening to other people share what they had to say. Writing had its place, but like all muscles if you stop working them eventually they atrophy. I went from assuming I’d get back to writing, to essentially avoiding it.
Besides a smattering of writing about Consequence Design, all my best stuff is probably buried in a series of tweetstorms. Now that Twitter is essentially a hollow-out husk of itself, I need to figure out how to start writing for myself again.
One of the things I don’t want to do is write only about tech & design stuff. I have a lot of semi-interesting thoughts that I’ve gained from coaching HS tennis over the past few years and how it relates back to my work as a director and I intend to start tracing out those steps more. I doubt we’ll ever devolve back into the days of a personal blog as me reflecting on what shows I watched or music I’m listening to; but I do think it’d be nice to reflect a broader array of the stuff I care about.
(So that might mean a tea rec or two…)
Either way, the hardest part of throwing a new website up was figuring out what the purpose was. If it’s about marketing yourself, then you need to write and structure the site to attract whatever the audience is. Once I realized I didn’t care, and I just needed a place to get out ideas without having to worry about the site going away, it was pretty easy to spin up something and think about writing.
So that’s my plan here.