Writing isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. There are a lot of times that people sit down to pour out their thoughts onto virtual paper and nothing happens. Or they spend hours and hours researching a topic only to put something together that falls apart because of assumptions about a key point that aren’t true.

The world is becoming more and more enamored with other forms of media. We like listening to podcasts instead of reading. We prefer short videos instead of long articles. Visual aids beat a wall of text any day. Even though each of these content types has a script it still feels better having a conversation. Informal chat beats formal prose every day.

Written Wringers

I got into blogging because my typing fingers are way more eloquent than the thoughts running through my brain. I had tons of ideas that I needed to put down on paper and the best way to do that was to build a simple blog and get to it. It’s been eight years of posting and I still feel like I have a ton to say. But it’s not easy to make the words flow all the time.

I find that my blogging issues boil down into two categories. The first is when there is nothing to write about. That’s how most people feel. They see the same problems over and over and there’s nothing to really discuss. The second issue is when a topic has been absolutely beaten to a pulp. SD-WAN is a great example. I’ve written a lot about SD-WAN in a bunch of places. And as exciting as the technology is for people implementing it for the first time, I feel like I’ve said everything there is to say about SD-WAN. I know that because it feels like the articles are all starting to sound the same.

There are some exciting new technologies on the horizon. 802.11ax is one of them. So too is the new crop of super fast Ethernet. We even have crazy stuff like silicon photonics and machine learning and AI invading everything we do. There’s a lot of great stuff just a little ways out there. But it’s all going to take research and time. And learning. And investment. And that takes time to suss everything out. Which means a lot of fodder for blog posts as people go through the learning process.

Paper Trail

The reason why blogging is still so exciting for me is because of all the searches that I get that land in my neighborhood. Thinks like fixing missing SFPs or sending calls directly to voicemail. These are real problems that people have that need to be solved.

As great as podcasts and video series are, they aren’t searchable. Sure, the show notes can be posted that discuss some of the topics in general. But those show notes are basically a blog post without prose. They’re a bullet point list of reference material and discussion points. That’s where blogs are still very important. They are the sum total of knowledge that we have in a form that people can see.

If you look at Egyptian hieroglyphs or even Ancient Greek writings you can see what their society is like. You get a feel for who they were. And you can read it because it was preserved over time. The daily conversations didn’t stand the test of time unless they were committed to memory somehow. Sure, podcasts and videos are a version of this as well, but they’re also very difficult to maintain.

Think back to all the video that you have that was recorded before YouTube existed. Think about all the recordings that exist on VHS, Super8, or even reel-to-reel tape. One of the biggest achievements of humanity was the manned landing on the moon in 1969. Now, just 50 years later we don’t have access to the video records of that landing. A few grainy copies of the records exist, but not the original media. However, the newspaper articles are still preserved in both printed and archive form. And those archives are searchable for all manner of information.

Tom’s Take

Written words are important. Because they will outlast us. As much as we’d like to believe that our videos are going to be our breakthrough and those funny podcasts are going to live forever, the truth is that people are going to forget our voices and faces long after we’re gone. Our words will live forever though. Because of archiving and searchability future generations will be able to read our thoughts just like we read those of philosophers and thinkers from years past. But in order to do that, we have to write.