"Reclaim Blogging": Why I'm giving up Twitter and Facebook.

[Factoid: This is the first cartoon I ever put online, back in the day, 1999, two years before I registered the URL, gapingvoid.com. What an amazing journey it’s been since then.]

Earlier today I told everybody on Twitter and Facebook, that I’m leaving Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end.

Besides, even if they’re very good at hiding the fact, over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.

The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.

And as I’ve said many times over the years, Web 2.0 IS ALL ABOUT personal sovereignty. About using media to do something meaningful, WITHOUT someone else giving you permission first, without having to rely on anyone else’s resources, authority and money. Self-sufficiency. Exactly.

i.e. not waiting for the green light. In the blogosphere, the only light IS the green light.

And I think a lot of people have lost that idea. Instead or writing about something that’s ACTUALLY important to them, they’re telling al their zillions of Foursquare friends what food trucks they just visited.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but…

Recently I had (non-online) conversations with two seminal, veteran bloggers, Doc Searls and Anil Dash.

On both occasions, we were reminiscing about the early days of blogging (I started gapingvoid in 2001, btw. Doc and Anil, a couple of years before that).

A decade ago, blogging seemed more powerful, more revolutionary, more disruptive… more like the way we wanted the web to be, as opposed to how the corporations wanted it to be.

But like I said, it was hard work. You had to write a lot, every day. And you had to be a good writer with something to say. Or else it would wither on the vine.

In other words, the barriers to entry were high, in terms of both talent and energy required.

So clever, talented people everywhere started inventing tools that made Web 2.0 much easier for ordinary people: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. That was a good thing.

But I think something was lost in the process. Suddenly it got a lot easier for the bloggers to be lazy.

And so people DID become lazy. In HUGE numbers.

Not that there aren’t any good blogs still out there- of course they are- but in the last five years or so, something magical was lost, or at least, diluted.

I think now is a good time to remind people why we all got into blogging in the first place, all those years ago. I think now is a great time to “reclaim” blogging, so that is exactly what I’m doing. Here and now. Rock on.

So from now on, if you want to talk to me, do it in the comments below or send me an email, Thanks.

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare et al… it’s not my content. It’s not your content, either.

Decide.

[UPDATE: I’m not completely stupid and out out of touch; I do realize that A LOT of my friends still use Twitter at the expense of everything else (including RSS) and may need some time to adjust, so for now, we’ll still using my Twitter account to retweet links to my blog, just like Seth Godin does with his. But I won’t be spending any personal time over there, either. In fact, I’ve given my log-ins to Laura (she runs my gallery operations) and asked her to handle it instead. My personal online presence will just be here on my blog, and of course the newsletter. But I’m pretty much done with everything else…]