Those of you who have followed me on Twitter or on Facebook over the past few years know that I love sharing interesting things I find on the web. The overwhelmingly vast majority of my tweets feature links to stories that I find provocative, enlightening, and/or infuriating.
That being said, I’ve decided to move as much of this content as possible over here to my blog. My tweets will still continue, with snarky movie commentary, scintillating discussion with colleagues, photographs, and veiled references to my personal life, plus the occasional fast-and-dirty link. But I’m making as much of an effort as possible to move my linked content here. Why, you might ask?
- Equity – Twitter is a media company now, selling advertising/promotions off the backs of millions of users who contribute to Twitter’s content for free. This is completely Twitter’s prerogative. But it is my prerogative to want to derive some value or equity from the time that I put into building my online presence. If I’m just posting everything I find on Twitter, Twitter is getting all the value.
- Archival purposes – Twitter’s search function is atrocious and there is no easy way to access tweets that are more than a few months old. Having a blog that contains all your linked content is great in that it gains you the ability to search through old things you’ve written/linked, not to mention you can search via good-old-fashioned pagination (a feature that Twitter got rid of ages ago).
- Some things require more than 140 characters to comment on – This is self-explanatory, but in addition to allowing longer-form writing, a blog also forces me to think about the stuff I’m posting and possibly even express a cogent opinion about it.
- Response – Blogs allow people the ability to comment on stories, and potentially engage in dialogue with you. This is superior (slightly) to Twitter’s @reply functionality for a variety of reasons, primarily because it preserves the timeline and allows for categorization.
- I own it – Ultimately, it comes down to this: I own davechen.net and all the inbound traffic/links here. I’ll probably never monetize it, but the point is that companies come and go, they change and make poor decisions. Twitter won’t die anytime soon, but I don’t want to just surrender all my content to a Silicon Valley startup and hope it ends up for the best.
My hope is that eventually, more people will come here (or come here more frequently) than check my Twitter account. I’ll keep putting in the work if you guys keep reading. Thanks.