[Matt Webb]

I love this:

"Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do."

Fun fact: I started my first startup, the open source social networking platform Elgg, after my university employer told me, verbatim, "Blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms." I've been pro-blogging both long before and long after it was cool.

So sure, blogging might never be mainstream. But it can also be leading edge: a way to demonstrate what ownership can look like. A place to own your words by every definition of the word "own".

Everyone should have a blog. Everyone should write on their own terms. I want to read everyone's reflections; understand their worldviews from their perspectives, from a space that is truly theirs.

As Matt says:

"I evangelise blogging because it has been good to me.

[...] You should start a blog. Why? Because, well, haven’t I just been saying?"

There's no better time to start than now.

#Indieweb

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