Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author.
I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.
I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.
If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.
The best one we've come up with is a Russian-American fusion truck named "Collusion", serving (alcohol-free) cocktails named after all the major players / plot points in the "Russia investigation".
It's an endless source of entertaining ideas. "Moscow Mueller", "Manafort on the Rocks", "Cohen Kvass". Or you can go for drinks that are flavored after their namesakes: dry, sweet, bitter, sour.
Park it in front of Trump Tower on central park, and Instagram fame would be instantaneous! Feel free to steal my idea.
Another variation on this is the opening titles to "Bob's Burgers".
A series of disasters hits the restaurant before its ultimately opening (fire, pests, etc) and the respondents (exterminator,etc.) has a new, funny name each time. Also, the neighboring stores' names vary in funny ways.
I have a similar concept: collections of fake band names, domain names, stand-up comedy pieces, and rap-suitable lyrics. The trick is extracting coherent routines that tell a story well.
Ages ago, in the age of Usenet, I had a huge collection of such bits (plus quotes of others) for use in .signature files.
I had an idea for a Vietnamese Italian fusion joint called Pho gettaboutit. Rice noodles, rare beef, and tripe with Bolognese sauce and garlic bread? Mmmmmm.
If you're passionate about a subject, you're going to have strong opinions about said subject. If you voice/publish those opinions, some people are going to hate you. Perhaps a potential employer was set to hire you until they read your blog post in which you were eloquently critical about offshoring, for example.
Or worse, you expressed an off-hand opinion about some social issue back in 2006 in an otherwise technical blog post that the wrong person stumbled upon and now the world is going to cave in on you.
I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.
I understand your concern, but I think you can avoid a lot of the negative sides by only writing about things you like. It’s really hard to piss people off if you’re sharing experiences about things you love, especially if you stick to just your experiences and never try to tell people what the “right” way to do things is.
Political views have never been much of a problem for me. I’m strongly opinionated, but I also work in the public sector, which means I leave my personal political views completely out of my professional life. That is certainly a form of self-censorship, but even though it it’s forced upon public servants, I can’t think of a single time I regret keeping my political opinions to myself. There are certainly political movements I wouldn’t work for, but over all it rarely seem like a good idea to get into politics unless you actually want to make a career out of it.
> I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.
Just write about your favorite hobby. When I started my personal blog a decade ago (yikes...), I chose a topic and made a rule that I would stick to it. No politics, no tech, no personal drama. I still enjoy writing about it, and have almost always stuck to the rule, so I don't think an employer could take offense at any of the several hundred thousand words I wrote.
I don't point potential employers to my personal website (which I also don't associate with my real name). It's just none of their business. When I want to share work that I've done, I put it into a standalone presentation that I provide on a memory stick.
This has been stuck in my mind for a while. The past months, whenever I searched for something I would get covered in pages upon pages of SEO-friendly copywriter bullshit without real content; it's driving me mad.
How possible would it be, to build something like this?
I am also thinking about this problem constantly. SEO destroyed internet for me. I keep searching on HN using https://hn.algolia.com but obviously you can use it only for specific topics. I think there is a market in this problem
You could start a search engine with data from commoncrawl, maybe you can even get other projects like archive.is to ship you some hard drives. Then you just need to build an index and serve search queries; plenty of open source search engines have been attempted, giving good Templates or even directly usable implementations.
The hard thing is distinguishing personal blogs from blogspam and other worthless content. Performance is a huge issue since you want to spend at most double digit milliseconds per page, but maybe it's getting viable with ML becoming commoditized. But getting this perfect would make or break the project.
I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.
I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.
If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.