My life is now such that I don’t have the time to do long-form, thoughtful blogging. When I have time to think about big ideas expressed in well-chosen words, it’s as editor at Friends Journal. I have a rather long commute but it’s broken up with transfers, I often have to stand and I usually don’t have a laptop on me. What I do have is a smart phone, which I use to keep up with Quaker blogs, listen to podcasts and take pictures.
Despite this, I can usually write a few paragraphs at a time. Kept at steadily those could amass into blog posts. But the finishing-up effort is hard. I have a 2/3rds completed post lavishing high praise for +Jon Watts’s new album sitting on my phone but haven’t had the chance to finish, polish and publish. So what if I serialized these? Write a few paragraphs at a time, invite commentary, perhaps even alter things in a bit of crowd-sourcing?
Any feedback I’d get would help keep up my enthusiasm for the topic. This informal post-as-chat was actually the dominant early model for blogs, one that fell away as they became more visible. It’d be nice to get back to that. The medium seems obvious to me: Google+, which allows for extended informal posts. So I’ll try that. These will be beta thoughts-on-electron. If they seem to gell together, I might then polish and publish to QuakerRanter.org, but no promises. This is mostly a way to get some raw ideas out there.
Google+: View post on Google+
First mini-post done just before we descend into tunnel
So are you going to do these on Google+, your blog, or both? I like the idea. Weren’t blog posts supposed to be rather brief “back in the day” (besides the writer who was posting chapters of a work in progress).
The idea is to do it on G+, where there’s more comments and where it’s easy to do. I did write a few paragraphs this morning on the train but it was set to limited audience so it didn’t get out. I’ll try it again later. My idea is that if there’s engagement I can cut and paste them into a longer piece to publish on the blog.
I love this idea. Especially since I, too, don’t have time or energy to write or even read blogs anymore. I’m reading, except for books and The New Yorker, in 140 characters or FB posts.
Check it out elsewhere on my G+ stream. Here’s a question I’m not sure of: should I post every 2 paragraph installation as its own post and recommend people hunt around for the whole thread, or should I write follow-ups as comments. I’m doing the latter with this first experiment, though I’m wondering if the convo won’t be as visible that way. I don’t care about wide-spread visibility: this is unedited and if I like the end product I’ll give it the more visible platform of QuakerRanter.org; the visibility I’d like is the core interested friends who might have interesting commentary to offer…
I like the idea of doing separate “posts” on Google+. You might want to briefly refer back to previous related posts. I understand the adding your comments to the first post as “addendum”, but I initially think these are comments vs. the next part. But, this is all so new so I’m only giving first impressions. BTW, I don’t know if you had anything to do with it, but the FJ site is looking nicely updated (although I haven’t seen it lately, admittedly).
An advantage of separate posts is that they would tweet out. I’ll experiment.
Thanks for the FJ complements, I’ve been helping on the content end. Most of our energy is going toward a new WordPress-powered site. Most of my attention is on the editorial infrastructure: seeing how far we can use GDocs – for edits with authors, copyeditors, for auto-posting to the website, and for auto-syncing with InDesign (so that we can make last-minute changes in GDocs to show up in the print edition). It’s a lot of changes for an organization where most of the editorial/production process flows were set up pre-internet, but I hope it helps us be more topical, use volunteers better, and free our time for more active article solicitation and experiments like video.