I Got 99 Problems and Blogging is One

Blogging is underrated but blogging is broken.

Blogs instigate new ideas, teach us, and spark insights that can lead us to unseen, transformative directions. I realize that may sound superfluous but it’s true. Blogging is knowledge-transfer and anything that facilitates this has the potential to cause exponential ripple effects in the advancement of humankind.

But blogging’s got problems:

• Writing is hard. It takes time and lots of effort.
• Insights are unexpected. New blog posts come to me through my experiences and observations. 99% of the time, I’m in no position to synthesize my thoughts into a post and instead record the idea for later, unfortunately most never see the light of day.
• It’s easy to start but difficult to finish. It’s embarassing how many unfinished drafts I have that will never get published.
• You don’t really know what will resonate with readers until it’s out there. Although I primarily write for myself, it’s discouraging to find few people read, let alone share a post I’ve spent hours writing.
• Creating or finding visuals is time-consuming. Photos and diagrams are often a great supplement but don’t come free.
• Writers lack feedback. Unless you’re a prolific blogger, most posts receive little-to-no feedback. The feedback that is given, is disparate across different social networks, communities, or private communications like email.
• Writers lack a personal connection with readers. Twitter is the most opportune channel to engage but blogs are ephemeral for most readers. Reader engagement barely exists.
• Distribution and discovery sucks. Only those with with a large audience or the rare instance of one-off viral success, receive attention. There’s a wealth of great content with either mainstream or very niche appeal, that never finds its audience.
• The best insights are unsharable. The most valuable information is often proprietary and cannot be publicly shared.

Quora, Medium, Branch, Quibb, and Svbtle are a few startups tackling some of these problems but none have (yet) engineered a 10x improvement.

So if blogging is that important, how can we make it better? How can we encourage more people to share their knowledge? How can we make it easier for people to do so? How can we improve the effectiveness of knowledge-transfer?

Perhaps blogging isn’t the right medium.

Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer and (might I add) awesome blogger, “micro-podcasts” 1-3 minute audio clips on Soundcloud. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform and is still one of the best places to discover great content and engage with writers.

I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments or on Twitter (@rrhoover), hit me.