Future of making blogs

In today’s post I’d like to begin exploring a somewhat complex subject together. How our current state of rapid innovation in digital communications technology both as mediums of personal expression and platforms of mass communication distribution should prompt a shift in our perspective on content creation for the web and connected devices in 2021 and beyond.

The digital publishing landscape (of which social media and blogging with WordPress are but subsets) changes fast. Of course we’ve known this from the start. The evidence bombards us on a daily basis via the large number of popular blogs and social media outlets solely dedicated to keeping us informed on how best to continue to use the digital mediums of expression we are at that moment using. It really has become that fluid.

However, when it comes to understanding the really big changes like what I believe we are in the process of undergoing right now a surface commentary or simple list of tips and tricks won’t cut it. We have to step back and reflect on the big picture, take note of emerging patterns over time, and be able to draw contextualized conclusions. Conclusions that, while certainly not final, can at least begin to point us in the right direction.

Specifically, I’ll be talking about blogging with WordPress and blogger in this post, but the principles discussed should apply equally to every kind of digital content creation and distribution moving forward. I realize that probably sounds overly ambitious (if not downright impossible) but that is precisely what makes this approach so appealing to me and the reason I’m excited to share it today.

It has the potential to provide an elegant solution to the problem of needing as an individual or a brand to communicate effectively across a wide variety of digital mediums and platforms that are constantly in flux; right down to their core behaviors and algorithms. In an environment of such overwhelming uncertainty, insights into what it means to communicate with and connect to other human beings (perhaps even on a biological level) becomes absolutely essential.

These types of broad insights are possible when we begin to take note of the ways in which human beings have adopted (and adapted) the use of new mediums of communication and distribution over time. In this way we can begin to discover the underlying principles that have guided effective communication since its very inception however many hundreds of thousands of years ago that might be. Principles so deeply rooted in the human experience that we can apply them to any medium or platform, even those as fluid as our current array of digital communications technology.

The required shift in our perspective, is to recognize the importance of creating and refining the story or message behind a piece of content before attempting to determine its medium or distribution channels.

That said, I’ll be the first to admit that the ideas I express in this post are a mixture of my own creative thinking, extensive research, observation and speculation. I personally have completed no hard science in this area (though I plan to). Rather, what I’m attempting in this post is to bring a wider variety of factors and variables into play when considering the ways in which we approach creating content for the web and connected devices.