Subterranean Blogging

We think of blogging as being performative and public. It’s easy to think that you can see what’s happening - you read the posts, you can see a feed of what’s being written and so on.

But I’d argue that most of the value of blogging is invisible.

In an age where comments have moved to social media, it’s hard to see which posts are getting engagement, or who they’re getting engagement from.

Take some of my latest posts for example:

• Reflecting on things I failed to get done at Google has one comment on Commento and one annotation on Hypothesis. Not much to grapple with.
• Some Notes on Executive Dashboards has a single comment on Commento.

Both posts were big outliers though - one was on the homepage of Hacker News and one was re-shared in lots of design email lists. More than that - they both generated lots of fascinating discussions and connections. But it’s all sub-surface.

Yes, some of the conversation happens in semi-public spaces - places like Twitter or Hacker News. And there are tools that might help you uncover discussion and comments across the web, tools like:

1. Ampie is an app that gives you a sidebar to surface discussions as you browse the web
2. Twemex gives you a sidebar on Twitter that encourages more search, makes it easier to see people’s greatest hits and can help you quickly see who’s sharing an article (that’s partly how I use it)
3. Hypothesis is an annotations platform, and if you install the Chrome extension you can see conversations and discussions on articles as you browse (especially for a certain kind of content)

But none of these will let you see the conversations that happen in my Twitter DMs, in various Discord groups or in my Gmail.

We think of blogging as being performative but the value is subterranean. You can watch someone blogging and think that all they’re doing is throwing words into the feed, when in reality they’re sparking many interesting conversations and connections below the surface.

The unit of measurement for blogging is the conversation.

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Anyway, here’s a neat story about an underground garden:

Building a home and garden up to 25 feet below the surface allowed him to escape the scorching heat of California:

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I dunno, maybe an underground garden (blog) isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe, in the scorching heat of social media we need a cooler, darker space for connections and discussion. Where things grow more slowly but still bear fruit 25 years later.