I’ve been blogging for over ten years. That’s a long time in Internet years.

When I started out, it was rare for a non-technical person to have anything published online. Social networks did not exist, and even SAAS was barely out there, so anything you wanted to publish online had to be set up on your own web server with your own domain name. You think anyone but major, antisocial geeks would know how to do that??

And even if you set up your own site to blog on, you needed good software to handle posts, comments, etc. Maybe someone leaves a comment a few days or weeks after your post.

These days, publishing online has become so easy and instantaneous you barely need anything but a cheap cell phone that can send text messages. Your update is immediately published and distributed to your followers, with replies sometimes coming within minutes. It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come.

Now we can painlessly integrate our thoughts, pictures, videos, music, and much more online in such a knee-jerk manner, it is a shock that anyone still spends time crafting blog posts.

Well, I’ll tell you why I still do.

Social networks and the micro-updates within are fleeting, vanity-filled tidbits that only serve our short attention spans in order to pass the time or conduct rants and incomplete thoughts that we would rarely echo in person.

I won’t claim to be above social networks because I use them all the
time, but just because I use them that doesn’t mean I can’t see the big picture.

Social networks are raw, impulsive litterings of jagged thoughts and language, and have done nothing to supersede my interest in (and purpose of) blogging.

Impulsiveness may make for good discussion, but I prefer a deeper reflection before sharing it with the world, and the blogging format allows that.

Blogging, to me, is about pure writing, reflecting, and learning about yourself in ways you didn’t imagine.

It’s about thinking about things a little deeper than you would on a social network, and coming to far better comparisons and conclusions due to the mental process involved.

It’s about communicating a thought or idea in a prepared form, containing minor editing and revision.

It’s about believing in what you think, even if you thought the opposite just the other day.

It’s about answering to no one but yourself, but allowing readers to embrace the topic or opinion in a way that lets them decide whether it matters for their own inner-analysis.

It’s about knowing you are unique and the only thing stopping you from expressing that uniqueness is you.

So there. Ten years of blogging in a nutshell.