2017 In Review
I have been trying to figure out a year end post for a few weeks now and it has not been easy. There was some potential in a post hardrive failure since my MacBook died (see my earlier post)last month that didn’t really have the gravitas I was looking for in a last post of the year. In terms of hard numbers, I wrote sixteen posts this year on mostly Apple related topics and with one on professional development and another on e-books. I had hoped to write more in 2017 though it has come out about the same as in prior years. I would also like to move away from writing about Apple as much and more about embedded librarianship, which is something I am more bullish about and where I can add something to the space. There is plenty of commentary (both good and bad) about Apple already on the internet writ large and I don’t have volumes to add to that discourse. I will probably still write about my laptop odyssey though and also will still write about Apple announcements as I follow the space.
While I want to reiterate my goal to write more in 2018 I am less sure about the blogs place in that content distribution. One of my favorite writers, John Scalziwhose work I rather enjoy had a great post earlier this year about how visitors had dropped significantly to his personal blog since 2012 and his conclusions were that blogs are fading from the distribution channels in favor of social media. As someone who is a firm believer of owning your own domain name and having control over your content this makes me though is not surprising. My generation grew up setting up their first website via Geocities/Lycos and the latest generation has always had closed platforms like a Facebook or Twitter. To be fair, I am on both these platforms and enjoy them though you don’t really have a lot of control over your content once it is pushed into the environment. For instance, Twitter has been rumored to be in trouble for awhile and if it were to go away as a platform the content you put into it would be gone in its current format. I push all my content onto those platforms though the website has always been “home base” for my writing. If this were not a blog I don’t know how this site for function. I personally like it as blog though clearly the trends are moving more toward closed platforms.
This blog has always been an avid experiment so to that end, I am going to spend 2018 experimenting with other types of writing beyond the blog. I am going to be writing a monthly newsletter about genre comic books/graphic novels, tv shows/movies and other types of entertainment. I will probably try to push out a post with each issue to tie it back into the blog so if you miss one you can find it here.
I have another project or two that I hope to work on in coming year and as those come to fruition or move further along I will talk more about them.