Six (!) years ago I collected a lot of my writing from EPMonthly and Medscape, in links on Tumblr. I thought it looked pretty spiffy, and that I was establishing a beachhead on the next big platform. That didn't exactly work out. I had a Flavors.me splash page to organize my online web presences, but they closed down.
I set up a Medium account a while back, but haven't done a great job of maintaining that, either. This morning I cross-posted a few of my recent articles for EPMonthly and Telemedicine Magazine to Medium - they make it easy to import, and I like how the retrospective on pagers turned out. Maybe it'll get some claps.
Why not use Blogger more? I was thinking about this the other day, as I set up yet another health app blog. When I dashed off the first entry and clicked Publish, Blogger yielded to Google Plus, and I was prompted to share my writing amongst my Circles. I audibly groaned.
First, those Circles haven't been updated since 2012 or so. But most importantly, this latest post was intended for a finely-tuned audience of health app users; not my circle of high school friends or workplace acquaintances. The folks in these Circles, in fact, have never been the audience for this blogging.
An under-appreciated aspect of the blogging scene of the 00's was that we were essentially writing in the dark. The audience might show up, or might not. You could register with Technorati and other indices to popularize your stuff, or try to find an audience with Grand Rounds or other carnivals. But if you didn't want to, that was ok too.
I guess I got used to that environment - because the idea of putting each new blog post in front of old friends and acquaintances, like Google Plus suggests, seems pretty abhorrent. It's probably discouraged my blogging, over the years - certainly on this platform. Imagine if, at the end of each day, a publisher took the output from an aspiring novelist and asked, "are you ready to share this with your family and high school friends?"
Maybe it's time for (sigh) yet another platform. Fortunately, I have a home at EPMonthly (and Telemed Mag) that will continue to inspire and encourage my writing.
