Sharing the posts I write

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Since I’ve started blogging regularly again, the way I share my posts each day has been slightly adjusted a number of times. I recently was asked for some details on that, so here you go.

Before I tackle that, though, there are two important things to frame this with. First, you need to understand why I’m writing every day, as that impacts how I choose to share these posts. In short, these posts are primarily for me, and I’m not looking to necessarily force people back to my website to get “better numbers”. Read them wherever is easiest for you, and I hope you find some value from them..

Secondly, I’ve shared a bit about my process of collecting ideas and turning them from ideas to posts, which you can read here. Today’s post is a continuation of that, sharing what happens when I press “publish”.

Publish on WordPress

The first part is pretty easy — I press the “publish” button on my WordPress blog. There are ways to schedule posts to publish automatically, but I prefer to give each post one final read through to hopefully have it error-free.

You can automate much of the sharing from there, but I do most of it manually. I figure if I’m going to put a lot of work into each post, I can spend a couple of minutes sharing them.

Import on Medium

Next I import the full post onto my Medium site. I use the “import” rather than just copy/paste, as it offers a few benefits for search engine optimization if you do it that way. This brings over a full copy of my post so if people choose to simply follow me there, they can.

Share on Substack

Next I share and publish on my Substack site. This is similar to Medium, but is really how most of my email subscribers get my posts. Substack is great for that! This post from a few months ago talks about why I use Substack.

Share on social media

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Lastly, I share the post on a variety of social media channels including my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. There are ways to automate this, but I do these manually as well, for two reasons:

  1. I don’t share every post to every network. Some of the geekier posts I leave off of Facebook, and some of the more personal ones I leave off of LinkedIn. 90% of my posts end up on all of them, but I pick-and-choose at times.
  2. I customize the text I use to share each post, depending on the content and the audience.

Those social posts always link back to my main site, not to Medium or Substack, as that’s ideally where most people will follow me. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter.

Five minutes

While that feels like a good bit of work, most days I can get it all done in about five minutes. I have a folder of bookmarks for the sites to share, so I just open them up, publish the content for each one, and move on with my day.

Wherever you’re reading this, I hope you picked up a new idea or two!

Three simple rules for sharing

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Social media is often filled with memes and information that are just flat-out incorrect. Most of it comes from one type of sharing: “That fits my viewpoint, so I’ll pass it along!“. Truth becomes secondary to speed.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t share things that you agree with, but taking a moment to verify that accuracy of them can be helpful. Manu Moreale has three rules for sharing anything, and I think they’re a good place for most people to start.

1. Read or watch the entire thing before sharing it

I’ve seen this a few times, where someone will leave a comment on an article that they clearly didn’t take the time to read. NPR used that to their advantage a few years ago with a brilliant prank that got people to leave lots of comments about an article that didn’t even exist.

Another good example was a Facebook post I published earlier this year; the first response from “Bill” was very passionate, but confusing, and he admitted to just looking at the title and going for it.

Twitter has even done experiments to try to force users to read a story before passing it along, though with rather disappointing results.

2. Wait at least a minute after I’m done consuming content before sharing it

Manu’s next thought is perhaps a little more difficult. Just pause for a minute, take a breath, and then decide if you should share it or not. This is along the lines of my “Take a minute” post from last year, but Manu’s thought is more about just taking a minute for yourself to process and decide, which can be very beneficial.

3. Ask myself if this is something I’d like to receive

This last rule gets even trickier, and I think most people already follow it… sort of.

If someone shares a post that is wildly offensive, it still might pass muster because the person sharing it would certainly be happy to receive it as well (and they likely just did, which led to them sharing it). I think Manu’s point goes a bit toward empathy, and thinking if what you share would be of value to your larger network. That’s not to say everyone should agree with it (disagreements can be a good thing), but being civil is something we should all aspire to and avoiding dehumanizing words and concepts is a good step toward that.

Whether you want to follow those rules is obviously completely up to you. Manu does, I’ve done roughly the same thing myself (and appreciate his clarity with these rules), and they’re good things to consider the next time you find that great piece that you think is worth sharing.

The public to private bridge

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Social media can be great, but as I’ve said on here many times, it’s not yours. Using social media to grow your audience can be a very beneficial thing, but moving your audience from that public network to a private channel (such as an email list) is essential to your long-term growth.

We saw this a few months ago after Donald Trump was kicked off Twitter (and lost that public audience), but he had done a very poor job of moving those users to a private channel and couldn’t sustain his personal website for even a month.

David Perell did a great job of explaining this in a recent short (6 min) podcast of his titled The Public to Private Bridge. Building that bridge to bring users across to your private channels isn’t something that you can ignore forever, and is largely the idea behind a marketing funnel — use your popular public channels to drive awareness, but slowly guide interested users onto your email list and other private channels for sustained growth.

At some point in the future, Facebook will become irrelevant, Twitter will fade away, and new channels will likely grow to take their place. Using those new channels will likely be a wise move, but working to move your followers to private channels is your best bet in the long run.

Why most blogs should allow comments

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Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more blogs get rid of their comment section and simply say something like “go discuss it on Facebook”. I think that’s a bad move, at least in most cases.

At a high level, it’s because I still think we need to take back our content. Taking back your posts is a great start, but things fall a bit short if you continue to let social media handle the ongoing discussion. While people will ideally be sharing your thoughts on social no matter what, you should encourage the primary conversation to happen on your site.

While this blog doesn’t see a lot of comments (a total of 879 of them over the years), all of them have added to the conversation and a few of them have been quite interesting. Two quick examples were Dennis Crowley chiming in on my post about Foursquare in 2009, and Peter Shankman offering me a correction and more details about his thoughts on the “go ahead, pick my brain” post from a few years back. If I had just offloaded those comments to social media, they’d be impossible to find at this point. Instead, they add great information to both of those posts, even years later.

When it comes to allowing comments on a blog, the conversation is a bit different depending on what kind of blog you run, and I think blogs can be sorted into three rough categories:

  1. Very popular or business blogs
  2. Semi-celebrity blogs
  3. Personal blogs

Very popular blogs

If you run a very popular blog, or one for your business, comments can be a tricky thing. A good example is a company like Anna Griffin, who see dozens of comments on every post, and often hundreds on a post (like this one). This requires someone dedicated to managing those comments and keeping the discussion on track. It’s hugely valuable, but it’s also a lot of work.

If you fall into this category, I can argue either side of this. I think you generally should allow comments and then work to keep the conversation solid, as it’s a tremendous way to build a community (like Anna Griffin has done), but it can be tough to keep things on track.

Semi-celebrity blogs

This is the group that I think struggles the most with comments. When I say “semi-celebrity”, I’m thinking of bloggers that are essentially going it alone, but have a big following. A good example is Chris Lema, a fantastic blogger with a huge following, and someone that doesn’t allow comments. He wrote in 2013 about why he had them, but wrote earlier this year about why he turned them off.

As much as I’m a fan of comments, I’d likely do the same thing if I was in his shoes. If I suddenly had dozens of comments on every post, I’d either need to devote significant time or money to address them. There is value in those comments, for sure, but probably not enough to justify the expense.

In his reasons for turning off comments, though, his third one is this:

The third reason is because the community went other places. As social media grew in dominance, and blogs started taking a smaller role in online conversations and community, I noticed that more discussions were happening on Twitter (at least for me) than on my own blog.

He’s not wrong, but I’m still going to try to fight that trend. Social media is continuing to slowly fragment, so it can be hard to find “the” conversation from a particular post. Chris is mostly on Twitter, the majority of folks are on Facebook, I tend to enjoy LinkedIn conversations, and then there is the whole new crop of networks always coming up. There is one place you could put a discussion where everyone can see it, and that’s at the bottom of the post. Again, though, folks like Chris are in a tough spot in the middle and I can understand why his comments are off.

Personal blog

This post isn’t about folks like Chris, though — it’s about the 99% of us that don’t have that “problem” of too many comments. If you have a blog (and you absolutely should), you should strongly consider having comments enabled. If you use a solid anti-spam tool like Akismet, the upkeep is very minimal. I want to give people a chance to share their responses on here, as their insights on my posts can make the posts better than my initial thoughts ever could.

For example, people had some good thoughts on cord-cutting options, questions about Roam Research, and tools for keeping up with contacts. None were super long discussions, but all help to add more context when people visit those posts in the future.

There’s no perfect answer for everyone, and there are some great reasons why you should disable comments on your site. For most of us, most of the time, leaving comments enabled will help make the web a bit of a better place.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know. 🙂

Tell me about your research

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I’m seeing more and more people claiming to have “done the research” to support some kind of claim, and I suspect most of the “research” there is rather dubious. In most cases, they’re simply saying “I believe the views of person x instead of person y” — and that’s mostly ok. If you trust one source more than another source, there’s nothing wrong with that; just say “I watched a video” rather than “I did my research”.

The problem there is that you are likely being fed inside of a filter bubble of some sort. You’ll find source after source that supports your point of view, even if you’re in the minority. Social media is great at feeding people what they want to see and feeding their confirmation bias, so it’s important to dig past it.

Research it

If you’ve taken the time to really research a subject, tell me about it. Seriously. While I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a researcher by any means, I use some research tools to help with my blog posts as well as my general understanding of various topics.

Are you on the lighter side with a Roam or Obsidian? Or collecting via an extension like Zotero or RefWorks? Or is there a different tool that you prefer to use?

On the back side of that, where are you publishing your results? If the only place you publish your findings is social media, that doesn’t really count. A self-hosted blog like this is a better step, but even that’s not really adequate for proper research. Have you published an abstract or a paper with your findings?

Finding a source that you trust, and then watching and reading what they have to say can be great. Just make sure you’re seeing both sides of the story, and be clear about what level of research you actually did.

Building castles out of sand

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When it comes to building your presence online, you can build it out of rock or out of sand.

Naval said it well on Twitter a few years ago after Alexander Cortes was kicked off of Twitter:

Building a following on Twitter is building a castle out of sand, as the implacable tide shifts in and out.

Invest in the free and open web – blogs, podcasts, newsletters.

As I’ve said before, using tools like Twitter and other social media can be great! There’s nothing wrong with diving in there, making a community, and sharing your thoughts. However, it’s important to realize that Twitter can take it away from you at any time, for any reason — you’re on their system, so it’s their rules.

Make great use of social media if you want, but take the time to build your own space on the web that no one can take from you.

Facebook still isn’t listening to you

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It’s a common joke (or sometimes a fear) to “be careful what you say, because Facebook (or Google) is listening to you“. While it may be often intended as a joke, there are many people that think it’s true and there are some decent reasons to believe that it might be. However, I don’t think it is and I have four reasons why.

1. Facebook would get caught

There are literally thousands of people out there that tear apart everything Facebook puts out, trying to catch them in the act of listening — and they’ve found nothing. These are brilliant people, and there has been no evidence of Facebook or Google secretly listening to our conversations.

It comes down to three pieces here:

  • People dig deep. As a simple example, here is an ongoing series of posts at XDA where they dig deep into the code for various Android app updates to see what they can find. Other people go much deeper, many want to be able to find bad things against Facebook, and they always come up empty.
  • Notification lights. Android and iPhone both have system-level notifications for microphone access. For this to work, Facebook would either need to have found a way to get around that on both operating systems, or they struck super-secret deals with both companies to allow them to surreptitiously listen in on everything.
  • Packet sniffing. All data on the internet travels in “packets”, and it’s fairly easy to watch those packets on your network to see where they’re going. By watching (“sniffing”) where the packets are going, you can see when companies are mysteriously sending data from your devices to their servers. People have used this technique to try to catch Facebook, and again have come up with nothing.

2. They’re still not great listeners

Every night before I head up to bed, I tell my Google Home to “turn off my home office lights”. The house is dead quiet, I stand right in front the speaker, speak carefully, and it still gets it wrong once a week or so. The listening skills of these devices is amazingly good, but far from perfect. If this speaker can’t understand one clear intentional statement in a quiet room, I find it hard to believe that Facebook is going to pick up the full story among a bunch of friends in a noisy restaurant to serve perfectly targeted ads the next day.

3. You see 5-10k ads/day

Studies show that you generally see between 5,000 – 10,000 ads every day, and that contributes to this issue. We’re very used to tuning them out, so we generally don’t really notice most of them. That is, until a friend mentions something and the same ad pops up again, but this time you notice it and become alarmed. I attribute that to the Baader-Meinhof effect, as I dug into a few years ago.

(sources: PPC Protect says 6-10k/day, Clario says 5,000+/day, Small Biz Trends says 6,500-11,000/day, and Whoofey says up to 10,000/day)

4. The truth is worse

In that same article about Baader-Meinhof, I also shared an episode of the “Reply All” podcast where they dug into this. While Facebook and Google aren’t literally actively listening, the truth is perhaps more scary because they have a lot of information about you. They know what you purchased recently, what you look at online, and where you’re going. Connecting that with your friends (since they know when you’re together), they can make some pretty good guesses at what you might be interested in.

Privacy is something you should certainly be paying attention to, but I’m convinced that Google and Facebook aren’t listening to you — they’re not willing to risk getting caught, and they don’t really need to listen anyhow. If you want to try to be a bit more secure, my post about the Freedom Phone shows some good places to start (which, ironically, is certainly not with the Freedom Phone itself).

Where do you really get your news?

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Almost every day I see someone complaining about “the media”, and the lack of coverage on a particular story or the slant given to something that happened. Despite that, I still maintain that you are the media. It’s important to have professional news organizations out there, for sure, but they no longer have very much control of which stories spread and which ones don’t.

Where does your time go?

Looking at the numbers, the average American spends less than 30 minutes a day watching news content on TV (source), yet nearly 2-1/2 hours each day on social media (source). There is likely a bit of crossover, with proper news outlets featured on social media, but social media content consists mostly of your friends and the businesses that you choose to follow. If they share a story from a major news source, it was their decision to share it — they’re the media.

Keep wide views

This leads to the obvious problem of trapping yourself in a filter bubble — if all of your friends share the same views, then that’s all you’ll ever see. I personally cut relatively few people from my social media feeds, in an attempt to see a varied set of angles throughout each day. There are some that are clearly racist or otherwise inappropriate, and they get cut, but I really enjoy seeing posts from those that I disagree with as they help broaden my view. Those that can see both sides of the aisle are often the most informed, and in turn they become a big part of “the media” in my world. Choose those people carefully.

Shiny, happy, fake people

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We all know it’s true, but we all do it anyhow. We know that people only show their best side on social media, yet we compare our own lives, and our messiness, to the perfectly curated feeds from others.

In the book “Back to Human“, author Dan Schawbel points to a study from a few years ago that makes the connection clear:

University of Houston research from 2015 found that the more active someone was on Facebook, the more likely they were to be depressed. According to the author, that may be because they compare themselves to the curated, shiny and impossible versions of their friends’ lives put on display.

The solution is right in front of you. “The more active someone was on Facebook…” is the problem, and since the study was done six years ago, I think it’s safe to add things like “Instagram” and “TikTok” to the list. The more time you spend on those, the worse you’ll feel.

That’s not to say you should avoid social media entirely (though that’s not necessarily a bad option), but just watch your time on there. The deeper you go, the more “perfect lives” you’ll see, and the worse things could get for you. Social media gets worse when you consider the filter bubble and how you slowly begin to see posts from only one side of any issue.

Keep in mind that virtually every picture you see on social media has been perfectly tweaked to make the poster look as good as possible, so don’t try to compare your mess to someone else’s fake perfection.

Blogging isn’t a tech issue, it’s a fame issue

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I’ve said on here quite a few times that most everyone should have their own blog, and they should use it as the central place to share their ideas. I still fully believe that, but a recent post from Manuel Moreale has me rethinking my perspective a little bit. Here was his main point:

No one can amass million of followers on a person blog in a matter of weeks. That is something that can only happen on a social platform like Instagram or TikTok. And that’s why most people don’t go down the personal site path. Most people are not chasing freedom of expression. They’re chasing fame. Quantity over quality seems to be the law of the modern web.

We recently saw this exact thing with Donald Trump. When he was on Twitter, it wasn’t the technology that appealed to him — it was the access to millions of users. When he was kicked off Twitter, he started his own blog — and then shut it down after less than a month due to a lack of readership. For someone like Trump, online content is 100% about fame and 0% about freedom of expression.

I think that mindset shift is what’s allowed me to keep publishing every day for more than eight months now. I’m glad people (like you reading this!) follow my work, but the site only sees a few thousand visits per month, which is not “fame” by any definition — and I’m ok with that. I shared early on that I’m writing for me, and if others get benefit from it then that’s just a fun side product.

Manuel’s post helped me to better understand why many others aren’t following suit. It strikes me as odd when people are using Facebook to vent about how awful Facebook is, but now it kind of makes sense. People aren’t trying to unpack whether Facebook is good or not, but rather just trying to get more eyeballs on their words for that bit of fame that they’re seeking. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it helps me to see why behavior like that actually makes a bit of sense.

But seriously — go start your own blog. 🙂