Brandon Quakkelaar has an interesting post on Social Media, Blogs, and RSS. His feelings are amazingly congruent with mine. We both don’t care for social media but recognize that they present a good way of discovering new content.
What are the alternatives? Quakkelaar says that blogs solve many of the problems with the shorter hot takes that one mostly sees on social media. The average Irreal post is between 3 and 4 hundred words, which is hardly long form writing but they’re much longer than a tweet. More importantly, writing a blog post is a different process than writing a tweet. Tweeting is like shouting out whatever’s on your mind at the moment; A blog post is more like writing an essay. It requires some thought and consideration of what you want to say and how to say it.
That leaves two problems. How does a consumer of blog content keep up with new posts and how does that consumer discover new content? The answer to the first is easy: RSS. By subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed you get notified when there’s a new post and, depending on the blog, a summary of the post. Of course, you need an RSS reader for this but there are several excellent readers available. If you’re an Emacs user, you can’t beat Christopher Wellon’s Elfeed. Take a look at John Kitchin’s excellent video on Elfeed or Mike Zamansky’s series on it (1, 2, 3) for a good introduction. If you’re not an Emacser, take a look at Feedly. I used it before I found Elfeed and liked it a lot.
Finally, there’s the question of how to discover new blogs. There’s no standardized way of doing that but Quakkelaar has a prototype solution. Head on over to his blog to see what it is.