The sad demise of the smartly dressed traveller…

It’s not just the smartly dressed traveller that’s disappeared. I recently saw a film of the streets of London in the late 1930’s, everyone looked smart, well dressed, and respectable. Yesterday a trip to buy some groceries revealed a man in a baby pink tracksuit and a woman wearing pyjamas, bathrobe, and slippers… not all progress is positive.

A little under four months ago I made a decision about my blog and moved it to use Ghost with the aim of building a more regular posting habit. Needless to say it hasn’t really happened. So I’ve decided to make another decision and go all in on Micro.blog.

Recently I’ve been on a slow and considered drive to simplify things in my life mostly in the digital realm, but not all of it. As a bit of a geek I’m prone to finding things, trying them out, or trying to build systems to enable me to do things. More often than not I abandon them (Notion, I’m looking at you) and return to something that does one thing well. For me it is Things for tasks, Craft for work notes, and Obsidian for my personal notes. There are no doubt other app of similar veins that don’t spring to mind right now.

Last week as I sat at my Mac a thought popped into my head. When I first started blogging back in 2005 the tools I was using were of a similar vein. At the time Wordpress was a much simpler blog focused CMS, there were no block editors or extra baggage to try and wrestle into submission. I could post quickly from my browser. Eventually I settled on using MarsEdit as my posting mechanism. It did exactly what I wanted allowing me to post to my blog without the need to fire up my browser. As I dwelt on that thought I realised that over time my blogging ideas have become more and more complicated. I wanted to create link posts, quote posts, or long form articles, all on a website that was well structured and looked good. Alongside that I had Twitter, and then ultimately Micro.blog. Small posts went into those places and soon enough I didn’t really know where I should post what. The resulting side effect? I stopped posting.

This saddened me. Blogging is a hobby, one I’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, and money into. I decided it was time to simplify. So I began looking around at setting Wordpress up again, then I realised, it’s too complicated and I need something simpler. So here I am. Micro.blog has more or less everything I want from a blogging engine. A simple posting engine, it looks good and I can customise it myself at a later date. So now I have one place to come when I want to post something. No matter what it is it will go here, one place to share what I want with as little friction as possible. Let’s see how it goes.

The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.

If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing. Yet we don’t call books content, we recognise them for what they are. Why then do we call blog posts or articles published on the web content? It takes just as much time and energy to write a series of posts on a blog as it does to write a book. Those people are not writing content, they are also authors they just happen to author a website instead of a book. So lets call them authors or writers.

The same goes for video. We don’t classify TV programmes and films as content, they are made by teams of people including directors, actors, presenters, writers, sound engineers, editors, and many more that I’ve missed. Why then are YouTubers classified as content creators? Are they not film makers? More often that not they do all of the roles that whole teams do for films.

Likewise with podcasts, another form of “content” that I “consume”. The skill and effort that goes into producing a podcast is the same as the skill and effort that goes into producing a radio show. We listen to radio shows just as we do podcasts, we don’t consume them. Why then do we not call the people who create them by the terms they deserve? The people who make radio shows are referred to as DJ’s, presenters, or broadcasters. Why do we not use these terms to talk about people who create podcasts? They may not broadcast their shows by a signal and mast, but they are still broadcasting their shows for all to hear on the internet (just as most radio stations do today).

I think it’s time we started to move away from the generic terms we use to define people who create and publish things on the internet and instead start using the respected terms we have been using for decades in the more “traditional” industries. It does a disservice to the skills of those creators when the vast majority are very talented people and deserve the credibility that comes with proper names for their professions.