It the end of the UK tax year, and I have spent most of this week on end of year paperwork. Fortunately, this blog post is not about that. Instead, I am returning to my favourite topic: blogging about blogging, or more precisely, blogging about keeping a blog. (The two are tangentially related, as my quarterly Director’s Report for my own business has a section about talks and events in it, which I was trying to complete when I noticed that, to my horror, I had yet to start the 2026 section of my archive page. So I fixed that as quickly as I could. Phew.)
I’ve previously written about why I think keeping an archive of my activities is so very helpful, not just for report writing, or compiling my newsletter, but in the longer term, to help me set goals, find strategies and reflect on my career journey. I’ve been working on a post about professional journalling, which I am hoping to publish next week as a follow up to this one, but this one isn’t really about writing, but more about having a domain, a home on the web, that I’ve kept and that I have added to for nearly twenty years. It really helps put things in perspective.
It also helps me sift and focus on what matters and what I am happy to leave where it is. For my purposes I don’t just want to have a record of everything I do or rely on automated processes or bookmarks. Instead I find great utility in the process of finding, evaluating and sifting the information. It’s like panning for gold. You sift through the water and find flecks of gold, gold dust that is then added to the vault and over time it compresses into bars (maybe that is overstretching the metaphor, plus my metal work memories remind me that gold bars are cast not compressed). You get my drift.
Often I learn things or see things I didn’t at the time of an event I spoke at or an article I wrote, and the process of finding the details, adding them manually to a page on my blog and then seeing the list grow each year is valuable to me (even though many of the links to things may break over time). What I gleam from the process increases my strategic and executive capabilities greatly and yet when I describe the process it sounds rather quaint. As if I haven’t discovered tools or services that could do all of this for me. I guess my sense is that I need to be doing it, to engage in the practice of sifting, recording and reflecting, otherwise there is no value in it for me.
There is a children’s book I am very fond of, it’s called Momo and it was written by Michael Ende (who also wrote The Neverending Story), in which a tortoise saves a girl from ‘grey men’ trying to take over the world with machines, and it’s the slow, meandering pace of the tortoise that renders them inconsequential (and thus invisible) to the ever rushing crowds around them. It feels like a very timely story to revisit. The process of keeping a blog, of adding to my own archive, is, metaphorically speaking, my version of the meandering pace of the tortoise, that which keeps me safe from the destructive rush of digital productivity and gives me time and space to think and imagine. Maybe it is time to revisit the Neon Flaneuse.
Very intrigued by the Neon Flaneuse story, and wondering if its not only the slower pace, but something else with the inward reflective perspective first or maybe it’s not the priority. But I feel like much is focused these days on the polished exterior, looking professional, seeking to audience, to be noticed.
So I always find still apt circa 2002 idea of Cory Doctorow of “My blog, my outboard brain.” that it starts with that was te way, and then ideally, it can serve the external interest/appeal as a secondary effect, not the primary.
You know I will reach for my repeated assertion of the value of having our timelined self. I expect that all these things you and I know from years of practice are not easily or readily championed to someone new, it’s like you have to live and learn it yourself.
I’ve had many bouts this last year or two of looking for one thing in my blog and finding something I completely forgot from a decade plus ago. In many cases, I find myself re-editing, to add references, fix links that have gone dead (fix typos). One recently was so powerful on re-reading and reflecting that it means evne more now than before.
The other thing I have noticed in going back through the posts how important and effective our the outward links for context, reinforcement.
Keep the blogging about blogging streak going!
Always a pleasure to chat about blogging with you, so thank you for taking the time to read and comment and share that Cory Doctorow idea as well. I have been rather a lot of him lately (mostly the fiction though), and it’s always thought provoking.