Thursday, January 09, 2014

2014 : Whither Composing?

I know I'm asking questions rather than making predictions this new year. But here is a prediction : Google are going to keep folding Blogger into Google Plus.

This blog has been a significant writing space for me for over 10 years. It's even survived a major name change (though not change of URL).

But I think Google have little incentive to work on advancing the art of blogging. That work is going on over at WordPress and Ghost etc. All Google's innovation here is going to be integrating it more tightly into G+ (everything I post here is already automatically forwarded there). Comments are optionally integrated (G+ becomes the white-list, a useful anti-spam feature).

In 2014 I have a desire to become less dependent on Google. And I believe serious writing needs a different kind of space from the hectic rapids of social media. And I'm delighted with the move of Smart Disorganized to my own WP. And I really liked my short-lived LinkBlogging experiment on Fargo. And I'm starting to get my head around putting stuff into ThoughtStorms again ...

And so ...

Well, listen. Seriously. I can't just dump this blog. That's really not an option. It's too established a URL. Too much history. And, ultimately, I like to keep an address somewhere at an address I don't own ... just in case my web-hosting and / or domain ownership suddenly collapses for some reason.

But I think Composing is going to change its role ... less writing here. More links to writing elsewhere. It's going to become more like the "social media" that Google obviously want it to be. An interface to G+ (with RSS output). And list of pointers to my other activities.

That's what I think is going to happen, anyway.

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