Back to regular blogging

Next month it is 15 years ago since I started blogging, only a few weeks before we started Tudou.com on October 15, 2004. Originally I used Radio Userland for my blog, but after a year I bought marc.cn and started posting there. The first post on marc.cn is this one in which I thanked Amy Gu to help set it up for me. She was a journalist at the South China Morning Post at the time, but went on to have an impressive career (she got her Stanford MBA, then among others ran Evernote in China, and is now a managing partner at a VC firm in Silicon Valley).

For years I blogged several times per week, but after moving to Canada blogging became more infrequent, partially because of more family obligations (no more nannies, drivers and ayis) and partially because I started to focus more on social media like Facebook and Twitter. Around 2017 my blogging frequency went down to about 1 post per month. I even stopped tracking my readers: I used to have about 50,000 unique readers on my blog, but I have no idea how many are currently reading it (I just installed Google Analytics again to see how many hits the domain still gets).

While sailing 2 weeks ago I started thinking more deeply about social media, centralization and the importance of owning your own data. Then it dawned on me that moving away from my own blog to social media had actually been the wrong move. Simply because you don’t own your data, and companies like Twitter or Facebook can shut your account down without any repercussions. My Facebook account was hacked once and it was shut down at least once because of impersonators (who managed to convince Facebook that I was impersonating myself). My Twitter account has been semi-blocked for almost 2 years, to the point where I even had to switch to another Twitter handle.

So a week ago I decided to get back to regular blogging. For the past week I put a blog post online every day, just to get back into the habit. I liked it because I enjoy writing and it does not feel like a chore at all. However, I feel that doing it daily might be too much of a time investment. It takes me between 30 minutes and an hour to write and edit a post. My time is valuable, but in theory I can make the time for that if I feel it is worth it (I’ll evaluate that in a few months). Or I can write shorter posts like other people who write daily posts like Fred Wilson (daily posts for 16 years) or Seth Godin (11 years), and only post longer essays every now and then. Not sure yet.

I do have enough topics to write about, that is not a problem. I have at least 7 topics in my head right now that I could write a post about. I am also not sure if I should mainly focus on my personal passions such as Bitcoin and the Climate Crisis, or if I should write more about my private life as well (like I did a lot in the early days of this blog). After being badly hacked early last year I learned my lesson that there can be a serious downside to oversharing. But a personal touch is important as well of course. I guess I need to find the style that I like best, I have not figured it out yet. I plan to start with posts a few times per week, but it could be that I will increase the frequency.

My email subscription still works, so if you want to read my posts regularly feel free to sign up (there is a sign up box on the left of this post). Although RSS is not so popular anymore after Google shut down Google Reader, you can still get all my new posts on other feedreaders such as Feedly.com as well (create a new feed and just input marc.cn in the content field). Thanks for reading!