A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming

In a post a few days ago I was writing about the importance of outgoing links as an integral — perhaps the integral — part of the web, and how social media sites seem to disfavour them because they encourage users to break out of their silos. This post continues that theme, but focuses on blogs.

So, sometime in the past few weeks/months I copied some CSS I’d spotted on Tracy Durnell’s site that adds a little “North East Arrow” character after any outgoing link - you should see one immediately after that link to Tracy’s site if you’re reading this on my site (rather than in a feed reader).

It’s a tiny bit of CSS, just to let you know that the link goes to someone else’s site, not to another page on this site, but in my mind it’s become increasingly important, it’s become an indicator of a good post.

Like many people I really love discovering links to things that I’m interested in that I haven’t seen before. The vast majority of the blogs I follow and read regularly I discovered because another blog or website linked to an interesting post that they’d published.

And there is an old trope that blogging is a conversation — which by definition requires more than one voice — and there is some truth in that. Possibly more so back in the first decade of the millennium, but it’s still there, albeit at a smaller scale.

Recently there have been a number of pieces published about blogs — notably Simon Reynolds’ piece in the Guardian in December (and the follow-up post on his own blog) — and I duly contributed my own thoughts on the subject at the beginning of this year.

In that post I referenced this post by Paul Graham Raven, and it’s relevant again here:

The point is that it’s not the act that matters: it’s not the typing-out of one’s thoughts into a blog editor window that defined “blogging”. Rather, it was doing that act in the context of, and as an mode of entry to, that ongoing conversation, that perpetual word-party that followed the dateline around the planet every day.

And rather than nostalgically calling for a return to the rose-tinted past, Paul goes on to qualify:

If there is to be a return to blogging, blogging must become something new. The practice must find (or perhaps create) a new context for itself.

And so there has been a small (on the scale of the whole web) but noticeable resurgence in blogging — or at least in blog posts that are discussing blogging, just as I’m aware that I’m doing now — and a few new blogs are gradually emerging, the latter of which, in my humble opinion, is a good thing.

I also don’t want to — and don’t think we can — resurrect the corpse of “how blogging used to be”, it needs to be, as Paul said, “something new”.

With that said, for me one of the most important aspects of blogging is that sense of people reading what others have written, and expanding on (or politely disagreeing with) it, triggering cascades of interrelated ideas. That, to me, is a fundamental aspect of a healthy blog or online journal, just as fundamental as the words themselves. If I didn’t want the Artist’s Notebook to engage with and be part of a wider conversation I wouldn’t be publishing it on the internet - it could just live in a file on my computer or in a literal notebook.

So with that said I have a rule: if a blog goes for three consecutive posts without linking out to somewhere else, then it’s not a blog, it’s a monologue with an agenda.

There are, of course, exceptions to this arbitrary rule - for example, James’ Coffee Blog frequently goes for several posts without linking somewhere else because many of the posts are personal memories, and outgoing links would actually be incongruous and unnecessary in such posts.

Similarly if I’m on a roll with making artwork then I might be only linking to my galleries (and to previous posts where I’ve talked about my artwork plans) for a few consecutive posts.

But when posting about something that’s not intrinsically personal then it seems disingenuous to pretend that your thoughts have arisen pure and unsullied from your brain without reference to any conversation going on around you, whether that conversation is happening online, in print, or in broadcast media.

One blog I’ve seen breaking my arbitrary rule only self-referentially links to other posts on their blog. It feels like a clumsy example of someone following decades-old advice from some dodgy SEO site on building internal links while not “losing link juice” by linking elsewhere, or perhaps trying to set themselves up as an “Influencer” and “Thought Leader” (presumably following some strict binary logic that you can’t be either of those if your thoughts have been influenced by someone else).

This type of crap is best left on LinkedIn where the rest of us will never see it.