In the Fall of 2012 I suspended my long-running Decrepit Old Fool (DOF) blog for a hiatus, which ends with the page you are reading now. In the meantime I explored social networking on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. (I’ve since archived my DOF blog as static html; you can peruse it if you like.)
Social networking has some awesome advantages for connecting with people. I believe it will continue to expand its position in human society; we are, after all, social beings. But there are a couple things that social networking lacks: permanence and control. You might get up one morning and find out the bright minds at Facebook or Twitter have decided to change how everything on your feed is displayed. And there is little assurance that you will always be able to link to (or even find) something you have written. For a quick aside, this is fine – but for a carefully-written essay, not so much.
The objection could be raised that wordpress.com is the same way, on a longer time-scale – and that is true. Hence downloading backups. If necessary, I can go back to running my own WordPress blog, but I’m just as happy to let them take care of system patches, etc. I do enough system maintenance at work, thank you.
Thanks for visiting and reading! I hope you’ll visit again, and look for me on G+ and Twitter.
georgewiman 