Why I Won’t Continue Blogging.

Going into my German 4820 class as a sophomore in college, I was excited to see how this could advance my blogging skills as well as open me to discussion and new ideas. When Medium was brought up to be our sole place we write in, I became even more excited to write. Unlike twitter or Instagram this could be a place a wrote more than 140 characters or shared a photo. I was soon wrong, the writing became tedious and task like. I missed the short blurbs of words I could write and submit. I wanted it back. Becoming familiar with Medium, was another story. Give yourself at least a week to learn the odds and ends of this site.

My experiences on this site was a love-hate relationship. It was hard to publish and edit posts as well as try and edit other people’s posts without rewritting their whole post. As a horrible speller sometimes I need spellcheck, with Medium you don’t get an automatic spellcheck or even a red line under your words saying “ hey wait you spelled this wrong!!!” Medium did have it’s perks though, if you were unsure about a blog post they have a feature where you can save it as a draft and then you can go back and edit the post when you have more information or a better idea of what you want to do. This helped me a lot when writing about food and researching. Something I thought was so cool and have never seen before on other blogging sites was that you could see your stats on a story. You can see how many people viewed it as well as how many people read it and recommended it. It was cool to be that proud of your work and then see other people reading it and sharing it. I also found it easier when you added a hashtag to your posts. Such as #food or #placestoeat, it helped get your post out there even more and people will respond to you more. You can look up anything by typing in a hashtag in the search bar and anything with that hashtag pops up. Which is way better to get your work out there and spread your name. When we did a Vlog one week for class, it was much different. It seemed more techy and that more people would enjoy it and the stats showed for that. Medium is a great site for getting you started blogging. My blogs mostly focused on food and it was difficult trying to describe and post photos of the photos in a writing format. I think people would have gotten a better idea if I would’ve done a photo journal or even multiple vlogs. For me though after this class, I don’t think I will continue blogging. It takes a lot of time to make sure everything is there and the content is good. I would much rather prefer to take videos and save them and send them out to friends and family of things I enjoy rather than writting.

I almost enjoyed Medium more for the content other people posted. There is not just one topic the writers cover. It is a free for all. I can search for anything and in a matter of seconds I can find multiple posts on it. Most people do this for fun but there are few people on this site that this is their profession. You can tell easily by the posts the people that enjoy doing this and the people that have to do this. Interacting with other bloggers was an experience. Some will comment on your posts based on the hashtags you put on your post and will give you insight and other ideas and maybe even recomendations. I know a few people messaged me separately and gave me food places that they thought were really good. That was cool that a community of people who share a common interest but have no idea who the other person is, will find the time and share what they love with you. The people on Medium, write for a reason they take this serious and they will write about what they want to. They do not care if the post is offensive or if it goes against popular opinion. They write for the real no matter what.

The future of blogging will slowly but surely fall, not for a very long time though. It will continue strong but slowly people will not want to spend so much time writing out one long post and spend numerous amounts of hour on it. When people will be too lazy to read it. I will admit if a post is super long I will just skim through it. People will get fed up with trying to read long posts. I think the future of blogging will turn into short blurbs of words like twitter and less than a certain amount of characters. Slowly but surely people will become lazier and lazier with how our world is going now. The Internet will not die though, We will slowly demise the use of paper and everything will be online. So blogging already has the upper hand in that and will continue to grow tech wise but not content wise.

I will not continue blogging in the future. I love getting my word out but not in the writing a post way. I will continue to share my opinions and cool things I did online. Although I think I will still keep my Medium account to read other peoples posts and see their photos, especially for food and travel. Well goodbye Medium, it’s been fun.