Much of my personal blog is actually ranked on Google for terms. I tend to keep my notes in my blog, I share it on HN and Reddit.
It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge. My personal, unquantifiable goal, is saving a million man hours through my blog posts. So many things are implemented or explored, but never shared. Knowledge in a vacuum is useless to society.
I wish more people would do this (write and attempt to rank content), it’s what makes the internet revolutionary (not the memes or messages).
>It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge.
It's such a long-term reward that can be hard to quantify when talking to people who operate in a "long-tail passive income" mindset.
I've kept my website about an obscure drum machine (the Boss DR-110) operating since 1999, I still get occasional emails about it, and I absolutely can see how what I've shared has shaped the drum machine ecosystem in little ways in the intervening years, from modifications people came up with and shared back, to hardware implementations from hobbyists, to the addition of its circuitry to modern mass-manufactured clones of similar hardware. Literally every copy of the schematics on the internet came from the service manual that I bought on eBay, photographed, and scanned from the negatives at what I thought was an absurdly high resolution at the time.
When my wife's M-Audio AV40 speakers developed a buzz, she found and replaced bad capacitors, and over the last seven years, has seen a stream of comments from people expressing thanks for showing them how to give their own problematic speakers new life.
>I wish more people would do this (write and attempt to rank content), it’s what makes the internet revolutionary
At first glance, I thought, "No, that's what broke the internet." Because I was thinking of all the spammy articles I find at the top of the search results.
But I see what you mean. People with useful insight should try to rank their personal/niche content. First page of Google Search used to show me articles from personal websites 10+ years ago, not anymore.
Yes, I often like to say: imagine if the general public instead of wikipedia only had the papers used as references. It's not about all the knowledge we have, it's about how accessible it is. And for humans to make sense of knowledge, we usually need to be introduced to models or simpler abstractions first. If we didn't only had the knowledge but it was actually accessible in human-friendly ways, like 3blue1brown level and above (and tools and frameworks and playgrounds too, not only generic knowledge; models are vital for humans to make sense of things!), the potential wouldn't only be extraordinary, it would be fulfilled. Or that's what I live dreaming about.
I actually would write more, if people would read it.
Unfortunately, if I write a blog on my personal website, nobody is going to find it. And I don't like Medium for their policy of forcing people to paywall their content in return for visibility.
If I post a link to a blog post on my website to Facebook, Facebook downranks it and doesn't show it to most of my friends (seriously, WTF).
The only thing I can do is post the actual text on Facebook, if I want people to read it, but there's a limit on post length, and in-line media isn't supported.
I don't write much on my blogs nowadays, but that's mainly because I lack inspiration. For the past few years my 'blogging' has mostly been long rambling rant-thoughts about obscure stuff on Facebook: it gives my friends something to chuckle about.
When I do write proper blog posts, the lack of an audience doesn't bother me anymore. It is (as they say) what it is. It's also liberating: I can write what I like without fear of reprisal or the need to justify myself - an online occasional diary, if you like. Last year I built a new website to collect together all my writing work. I included some blog functionality in it and rescued a bunch of posts from old Blogger blogs. It was fun to read them all again[1].
I, too, loathe Medium's business model. If I see a potentially interesting post here on HN which links to that site, I've taught myself not to click the link.
I thought I read somewhere in the HN comments that Medium articles are automatically down voted by the algorithm. I rarely see them. But I might be mistaken.
It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge. My personal, unquantifiable goal, is saving a million man hours through my blog posts. So many things are implemented or explored, but never shared. Knowledge in a vacuum is useless to society.
I wish more people would do this (write and attempt to rank content), it’s what makes the internet revolutionary (not the memes or messages).