I know there is a lot of writing lately about blogging and rebooting the “social web.” The core of this thought has to do with breaking free from the corporate silos, and I get that and agree with that idea. However, at least for me, I think the situation might be a bit more nuanced than one might think and that is driven by what motivates people to do any of this stuff.

What exactly does “social” mean in the context of the web? For example, does “social” require comments? Likes? Follows? What if “social” simply means sharing?

I don’t think of blogging as a social thing. When I think of blogging I first think of writing, my blog is where I publish my writing which is often reflects my thinking at the time. The reason why I bother to care to publish my writing on a web site on the Internet is to share it with others. I am sharing my writing or I am sharing something, usually another web site, I find interesting.

The thing is, I don’t care who reads my writing or whether others find it interesting. I hope they do, but I am honestly doing this for myself and I don’t look at any metrics. Perhaps this makes me a bit of a narcissist, but if my ego was in the front of all this I think I would be much more concerned about the metrics.

I do not think the vast majority of people who use the “social sites” think of it as writing, nor care about it as writing. The majority of people don’t care about a 200 word limit or that they can’t use bold face. The majority of people who use the “socials” are not the content creators, they are simply scrolling to fill time and to the extent they do write what they write are a few words or emojis.

I know there are people who do care about all the constraints put on them by the “social sites.” For these people I personally recommend trying out micro.blog because I think it already has all the things the proponents of the “social web” seek. I like the small community that is micro.blog and hope it never gets to the size of the corporate “social sites.” I am not too worried though because I highly doubt that the millions who use the “social sites” want to spend the time or energy to write a 400+ word blog post such as this!