Andrea Contino asked me a few questions about this blog. He’s collecting stories about bloggers and their motivations. You can find the full interview (in Italian) on his site, I’m translating here a few answers.
Why do you have a blog?
I started this blog in 2006 because I needed a place to publish stories and to collect links to interesting things I was finding online. I always used it as a personal space, publishing university papers which would have never left my mailbox otherwise. I used it to publish work related stories and travel pictures too.
I had topics more frequent than others, depending on time and personal interests. I had times I was posting often and long pauses in between. Now I’m committed to publishing every day. Pushing myself to publish forces me to dedicate ten minutes every day to it. It requires a little bit of research for interesting content or just creating new stories. It’s a great exercise I would recommend to everybody.
How did you blog help you to get to your current job?
In 2006, I started writing on this blog and through the contacts I made with it I got a job offer. I was asked to become a reporter for a new-born web TV called Intruders.tv. The central headquarters was in London and I was supposed to cover the Italian tech industry recording and publishing video interviews with my friend Livia Iacolare. We did that for quite some time and at some point, our professional roads went apart.
Livia started working for Current TV and now she’s at Twitter. I started working as a country manager at 123people, a Viennese startup. 18 months after moving to Vienna I left 123people and I joined another company. During that time I had the chance to get to know WordPress.com and Automattic more closely. At some point, it felt quite natural to apply for a position and after a trial period, I got the job.
Is it worth to have a blog nowadays? Aren’t Social Networks enough?
Social Networking Sites come and go. In ten years from now, Facebook will be different from what we are used now, it’s inevitable. Most likely, all the content we are publishing there it will be accessible in ways we cannot imagine now, but there is a chance it won’t be that easy to extract the whole value we are creating within the walled garden.
If we have our own blog, all the content is our own too and we can easily access it. When we select a platform to invest our time, we need to keep in mind the ultimate purpose of the content we are distributing. If we want to play a long-term match and stay competitive over time, we have no choice but a free solid platform. For this reason WordPress was my choice many years ago and still it is my choice now.
Even WordPress.com, a commercial product, as a cornerstone of the Term of Service, has the ultimate protection of the creator of content. All the content published on WordPress.com retains the original property to the creator and offers advanced export features if someone wants to leave the platform and migrate to their own infrastrructure.
Social Networking Sites are great tools for immediate, extended, and real-time interactions, but if we want to make sure that value lasts over time, we need to make sure we are publishing content in the open free web.
Which blog would you recommend to follow?
Scott Berkun is always my favorite author: http://scottberkun.com/blog/
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