The Blog Is Where My Thinking Has Memory

The reason I still blog is a long way from how the internet worked in 2013.

People don’t move around the web in the same way, but that’s ok. Search gives answers before people reach the source. Social platforms want the full conversation to happen inside their own walls. AI tools repackage what has already been written.

It’s easier to ask, “Why keep writing on a blog at all?”

If clicks are harder to earn, attention is more scattered, and people can now get the short version before they ever reach you, why still bother?

I now look at things differently and my answer is that the blog is not just where I publish ideas, it is where I find them. 

If you have a central place, it’s where you come back to sharpen your voice and thinking. Original thought is more valuable than ever.

Our AI lives do not make original writing less important, it makes it more relevant. You still need something to draw from. 

AI can summarise our ideas, but it cannot own its origin. That is why the blog still matters.

For many years, I treated my blog like an archive. I used the analogy of a library, of a place where finished thoughts are stored. It was somewhere people visit where they can see the work.

From a different stance, it’s a place where a thought can be tested, stretched, questioned and shaped into something more useful for people and for yourself.

The way it has developed for me is to have early formats of ideas that I started, that I come back to, so I can develop. As an example, I wanted to figure out what it takes for people to buy into your work, when it doesn’t sit within an industry or an existing system, so in 2024, I wrote this on why it’s the extra effort that wins. I only realised this year that buy-in works when you people know how to behave when they step into your space, you can read here. 

It’s taken four years of fighting this out, but I had a place to come back to.

Writing has helped me figure out what I think.

I see it in three phases…

1) The blog gave the newsletter somewhere to come from.
2) The newsletter gave the community somewhere to gather.
3) The community gave the ideas somewhere to be lived.

When You Are The Media started, in 2013, it was a weekly email and a website where I could publish. The focus was about encouraging people to have an owned approach to their work and to avoid a middleman.

Back then, blogging had a different feeling around it. People talked about content as a route to being found. You wrote, people clicked, Google noticed, and traffic became part of the reward.

Today, clicks cannot be the only measure anymore. Not because clicks don’t matter, they do. It is still good when someone takes the time to visit, read and stay with an idea that you worked on.

If the whole value of a blog is reduced to whether someone clicked, we miss the whole point and that’s why people give up when they don’t see the results they wanted.

It becomes a record, a pattern and proof of thinking. It also becomes a place people can enter years later and pick up the thread of how your thinking adapts.

That is why I still write. The internet never owed us an audience, but I want somewhere to begin, somewhere to grow and somewhere to be found again.

Most people now meet us in fragments around the web. It could be a clip from a podcast, a LinkedIn post, a comment or an AI summary.

This is powerful for all of us, as it helps us to be seen, but fragments do not always show the full picture of what we want to get across. For instance, if you saw a LinkedIn post from me, it shows what I think today, but the blog shows how I got here.

Trust is rarely built from one post, it’s the patterns that you thread together. Someone may arrive through one article, then they subscribe. Then they come to an event and then they feel a part of it all. Then they bring their own ideas into the space.

That does not happen because one post performed well. It happens because there is a body of work waiting for someone when they are ready. It’s there to show people you put in the work.

People are not always ready at the exact moment we publish.

Someone might not need an idea this week. They might not be paying attention this month. In the future, they can see that you show the path to a more encouraging future and that it’s better with you than without.

That is harder to do when everything and everyone lives in a feed. This is why I do not see the blog as separate from everything else I do, it is connected to all of it.

Without a place of origin, everything becomes detached from its roots. When this happens, ideas become easier to flatten. It just becomes lines without the thinking or content without the context.

I look at social media as the place where our ideas travel, and the blog is where they remember where they came from.

Every year, people who make and share work become more dependent on systems they do not control.

Algorithms change.
Platforms change.
Search changes.
AI changes.
Formats change.
What gets rewarded changes.

The danger is letting those spaces become the only place where our thinking exists. We are not just sharing inside someone else’s system, we are storing our memory there too.

We often judge content too quickly. We ask whether it worked this week, or it got the likes and clicks. Even worse we look at whether it reached enough people fast enough.

Your work is not designed to win the week. A lot of work is designed to build the body.

Someone discovers an article from three years ago and sends you a message (that’s happened to me). A sentence you wrote becomes the start of a talk (I’ve done that). A reader spends time moving through your work and understands you far better than they ever could from one post.

The value was never when you published first, it was in keeping going.

This is why I still blog when today does not promise clicks.

The point was to keep a place where ideas could be found, trusted, built on and returned to.

It’s important to give people somewhere to go when they want more than the fragment. It means you can then share your thinking and links with other people where it can be useful.

It can still be the place people return to when they want the full version.

That is why I still blog today. It’s not because the web stayed the same, but the work still needs a home.