<story><title>Your Words are Wasted</title><url>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mechanical_fish</author><text>So many things one could say. Maybe I&apos;ll try to blog some of them. If I can overwhelm my irritation at my blogging software.&lt;p&gt;Why does paying App.net a bit over four dollars a month make me a member of an elitist &quot;country club&quot;, while paying &lt;i&gt;much more&lt;/i&gt; than that for my own domain and hosting and backups and uptime monitoring and rapid application of security patches and the talent needed to manage all that makes me a salt-of-the-earth man of the people? Seems like that&apos;s only true from a very specific perspective.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve made too much money setting up other people&apos;s blog software to pretend I don&apos;t understand why Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr (and even HN, for that matter) are better. People don&apos;t want to be publishers. They don&apos;t even want to be writers. They want to share things online with their friends.&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of complaints in this essay about archiving - you can&apos;t find old content, you can&apos;t save old content. Archiving is overrated. And I say that as someone who loves archives and archivists. It &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; important to save things, but most writing is not intended for the ages. Quite the opposite: The fact that one can spout some crazy in-jokes to one&apos;s friends on Twitter, and in a week from now nobody will be able to find those words, is a &lt;i&gt;feature&lt;/i&gt;. And the fact that, in truth, Twitter and Facebook are almost certainly quietly archiving all your drunken rants forever, such that twenty years from now your neighbors will be able to pull them right up and show them to their dinner guests for a laugh, is a &lt;i&gt;terrifying bug&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Again, most people don&apos;t want to be librarians, publishers, journalists, historians, ethnologists, typesetters, designers, promoters, SEO experts, or proud users of a piece of software. And even those of us who &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; want some of these things enjoy taking a break once in a while. We just want to socialize.</text></comment>
<story><title>Your Words are Wasted</title><url>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grovulent</author><text>I really don&apos;t get the all or nothing attitude of this article.&lt;p&gt;I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account.  The blog gets my best content.  But it&apos;s not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing social graph (social buttons notwithstanding).&lt;p&gt;G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff.  It allows me to cheaply signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new readers/relationships.  I don&apos;t care if I  offend people on G+ because I&apos;m there to attract the like minded.  So I say what I think.&lt;p&gt;And facebook is just a socialisation wheel greaser for local friendships.  Here I&apos;m much more guarded.  I use content posted by people as conversation starters for when I see them in real life.  I might have to deal with these people - so I keep it light, fluffy and fun.  I personally don&apos;t care if facebook deletes all that content. (I see it as a medium risk since facebook isn&apos;t a particularly diversified business)&lt;p&gt;I decided a while ago that I need to engage on all these platforms - because concentrating solely on a blog only increases your overall isolation to your local life - cause it takes an enormous amount of time - and even your closest local friends aren&apos;t likely to even read it.&lt;p&gt;It might mean that I&apos;ll never put enough time into the blog for it be a standalone success.  But the odds of that ever happening were slim to nil anyway - even if it did get 100 percent of my time.  And there would have been a very high chance that I would have been miserable because such dedication would have led to a high degree of isolation.&lt;p&gt;This is the right balance for me.  I don&apos;t expect everyone to have the same view - but then I&apos;m not claiming it&apos;s right for everyone.</text></comment>