Musing about anything, often about war in Ukraine
🤦🏻♂️ Today, I just found out how to use Remark.as for commenting on a writer’s post. On the same occasion, I found out that many people were replying to my posts. I didn’t get notified by this, and I’m unsure how to enable this. 😳
I wanted to let you know that I read them all and thank you in advance for your comments and remarks. I’m highly appreciative of that. 🙏🏻😊
🤨 Even though I moved my newsletter home a few months ago from Substack to Ghost, as explained here, people are still subscribing to the newsletter on Substack. I’m happy to welcome new subscribers, but I need to register them on my Ghost instance manually. What else could I do? 💡Update my signup newsletter telling them about the new place! ⚠️
📚 While looking around me and paying attention to the generation that follows, I see most people on their screen looking at videos (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.). I rarely see someone reading on their screen, even less a book. I find it troubling in a few ways. First, I think people are becoming lazy about getting new knowledge and culture. Second, it’s harder to read than watching videos. Third, attention span has never been this short in the younger generation.
When I write an article with an average read time of more than four or five minutes, I know before hitting the publish button that very few people will read it. Those who do are probably older people. I might be wrong. I hope. 😒
Do you feel the same way?
🤔 When thinking about my newsletter subscribers, I often think about them as being people attending a class or a presentation: each newsletter being some sort of a presentation. According to my recent analytics, 45% of my subscribers read the newsletter. If I continue with the class or presentation analogy, this means more than half of the people who show up don’t even bother listening to what’s I’m saying. 🤨😔
Some writers prefer newsletters instead of having a blog, thinking they have a more personal relationship with their readers by sending them an email. Allow me to think differently. 🤔
📝 As I gain acquaintance with write.as, a typical blog post content and format is settling in. Each blog post has to be short (less than 400-500 characters), contain highlighted words for improved readability, include tags at the end, a few emojis and optionally a “Discuss” link to invite the user to comment. Each of these posts should require less than 10 minutes to write and publish. 🏷
🔗 When I write articles or blog posts, like this one or this one, I’m trying as much as possible to include external links. For link posts, it’s obviously mandatory for citing the source and the context. For other types of content, external links might guide the reader to read complementary content. Whatever the reason, adding external links can be time-consuming. My experience (and analytics) show that less than 10% of the visitors will click on them. I wonder if the time it takes to include these links is worth it. Do you visit external links when reading an article or do you find it distracting to do so? 🧐
Today, I deleted 54 blog posts from my blog at https://numericcitizen.me. This blog is where it all started for me, in 2018. Unfortunately, most of these posts were of very low value or simply outdated. This brings me to the question of content value on the internet; things move fast, value often declines quickly. It’s the case for my content anyway.
🤨 I wish I could have used Digital Citizen instead of Numeric Citizen as my pen name. Digital > Numeric in English, from the word meaning perspective and the idea of being a citizen of the digital world. Oh well. 🤦🏻♂️