Blogging is too ephemeral.
There’s so much content buried inside disperate blogs that is never discovered or resurfaced after it’s initial publish date. Evergreen content should be discoverable, not dismissed because it isn’t “new”.
This topic continues to reemerge as I think about the space. Here is an email I recently sent to Colin Raney who’s post, Rebirth of the Newsletter, inspired these thoughts.
Subject: Email <3
Hey Colin,
I really enjoyed your post, Rebirth of the Newsletter.
Good content usually doesn’t live off ads, and it’s usually hidden deep the niche, (the more different from your normal niche, the harder it is to find.) That content has a point of view and stirs something inside you. It inspires, or provokes, or has you seeing things you would have never seen. You can usually spot “good content” because it has a shelf-life, it’s worth reading/discussing about several days/weeks after it’s published.
+1000
To your point, the structure of blogging is broken. There’s so much great content that never gets discovered or resurfaced after its initial publish date. To use Andrew Chen’s blog as an example, he has a ton of evergreen content that’s “hidden”. Yes, you can search or browse his blog but there’s an almost subconscious belief that new content is more important and worth our time.
We (or at least I) also have oodles of articles saved in Pocket but only the few at the top of the chronological list get attention.
Quora and Medium are positioned to solve this (within their community) but I believe there’s an opportunity to repackage the gems buried within these niches. The content’s out there, it just needs to be (re)discovered.
Anyway, /endrant. Keep up the great writing, Colin. :)
P.S. I’m also fan of email and wrote about how I use it a few months back.
Thoughts? Send me an email (ryan@ryanhoover.me) or tweet (@rrhoover).