One of the things I started thinking about as I make the final push toward 4,000 posts (this is 3,995) is the length of posts. I joked about “goosing the numbers” to reach my goal, but baked into that joke is the assumption that short posts aren’t really blog worthy. Looking back through my archives, there were a ton of short posts between 2005 and 2009. I think it was around 2009–10 that microblogging platforms like Twitter absorbed many of the quick hits that would’ve once gone on the blog.
There were reasons for that, Twitter was a fun place to share for a solid decade. I’ve been on Mastodon for a couple of years now, and while things are picking up a bit for my immediate community, it’s still far less overhead in terms of posting, replying, and keeping track. In fact, pushing to get to 4,000 posts means I’ve been putting things on the blog that I might have a) tossed on Mastodon, or b) not posted anywhere at all.
The thing that’s fun for me about the #bava4000 challenge is that I’m posting more on my blog, and it’s been invigorating. I’m writing essays about movies for the Family Pictures Podcast; I’m sharing fun remixes from Maren Deepwell and Tom Woodward that appeared in a work Slack; I’m promoting a conference I might have otherwise simply boosted on Mastodon (if I even saw it); all of this in addition to my regularly scheduled diorama and VHS-scan obsession posts. The exercise of posting more has resurfaced a sense of what may have been lost as we’ve split our online presence across more and more services—even the open ones.
I was afraid that knocking out 24 posts in less than two weeks was going to be hard, but it wasn’t—it was easy. I’ve been doing this for 20 years; I’m a professional! Somewhere along the way a complex formed that only long, serious (well, I wouldn’t go that far) posts deserve space on the bavablog. Why? That idea just seeped into my workflow as I followed the siren song of centralized platforms. But 20 years later I still have the bava, and I can post how I want to.
4000? I remember the days when we celebrated 1000! I look. back on some of my earlier posts now with embarrassment, because there was nowhere else for them to go, but later they would have just been tweets. But I also miss that jamboree bag approach to blogging, just throw it all in there.
Spoiler – I’m not doing you a video for the 4000th post
No video? That breaks my heart. But the very fact you did one for 1,000 speaks volumes to how much it all meant and continues to mean. I am hyping this up a bit for fun, but also because this little spot on the web has meant a whole lot to me, and I am sure you are in a similar situation with edtechie—there is a sense of virtual home to the whole thing.
If you click publish its blog worthy. I’m with you in just feeling better when I post in my space, knowing full well it likely won’t get attention.
I partly agree with the shorter form in early years, often “here’s a neat tool/site”. there was a file cost of adding images (time to upload over modem speed). I’m not convinced Twitter took that over, especially when it was really short 140 chars. If anything what sucked us away to me was the dopamine hit of attention that came so quick, easy, and abundant in Twitter.
I do a year end thing with database queries to track the number of posts, comments, and commenters that year.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/109ZpaVt-HuoxXybCRQe1gZQnjVbXn1RJEgwDOCGzh24/
I see the drop more in the mid teens. I might be curious to see if I can rig and annual total word count that I could get at average length per post.
Don’t stop at 4000!
A post is a post is a post. Your ideas always gets a green light on publish — this is my theory.
I like that theory, I mean once we take blogging too seriously, is is still blogging?