Small b Blogging
I read Om Malik’s blog, and I really liked this post, partially because small, personal writing is exactly what I’m trying to do here. I like his “micropub” idea a lot. But how did I find Malik in the first place? Maybe all likelihood, I found him through another blog linking to him. Individual, interesting people sharing their ideas on the internet about other individual people’s ideas.
In fact, this blog I just linked is a great example of this process. Malik was responding to a blog he liked specifially about “small b blogging” by Tom Critchlow, which was the next thing I read (and liked.) Before I could even finish the article, Critchlow linked to the essay that inspired his post, “The Calculus of Grit”, which is lengthy, but is has some excellent writing advice:
Everybody writes. People who are trying to walk the path towards mastery rewrite.
There’s two lessons to take here: reading blogs that link to other blogs (and you, the reader, following those links to new places) will sometimes lead you to awesome stuff you simply wouldn’t have found otherwise. My ratio of joy in following blog links is so much higher than following social media links. It always has been, but in the last ten years it’s a lesson I’ve forgotten.
The other lesson is to blog your ideas enough that you then reference them, grow them, and (hopefully) become a better writer.
I know all this sounds pedantic, but I’m sorta just re-starting this (individual and hopefully interesting) blog and sometimes a simple idea has to get put down before a better one grows on top of it.