Seven Years Later Along the Journey

It's been almost 7 years since the last post on this blog.

Blogs are less relevant than the old days.

With Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Linked-In, Medium, Substack, TikTok and more, we all have so many places share to thoughts, links, videos and articles.

Many people I know who were frequent bloggers have stopped blogging and/or rarely post anything.

While social platforms have skyrocketed because of its reach to people within your networks, blogs have had three major obstacles in recent years:

• Failure of platforms (including Blogger, Wordpress) to innovate. It's MUCH easier to post to post to all the social channels than this blog, mobile or web. Not much has changed on the platforms (Blogger is basically the same as it was).

• Lack of distribution which means the only people who are going to visit your blog or this post are people who happen to find it through some search or because it was linked by me or someone else on one of those other social channels.

• Smartphones are better for quick, visual and bite size content, not longer form content, so as mobile has taken over the internet combined with the lack of easy ways to publish by mobile to a blog, people are going to post where it's easy for the maximum audience.

• Social channels continue to innovate, as illustrated by Instagram, Snapchat and now, TikTok (all leveraging mobile devices and visual communication).

So, why am I writing this post and why now?

It's 2020 and we are still in the middle of the first wave of a pandemic where the world was turned upside down.

• Online learning
• Work from home
• Webcams
• Video conferencing
• More use of desktop and laptop computers.
• Less use of mobile (with people being home)

All of these and many more reasons mean that consuming and posting content is not just being dominated by mobile, so it's easier to check on that old blog somewhere.

And, that's what brought me here today.

I was trying to look for something I posted somewhere and couldn't remember if I had put it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, but it turns out I had posted it here.

Going through some old blog posts was like opening up a time capsule.

Some things seem so odd today, including links I had to other blogs and sites that are barely in use anymore.

But, some things are still relevant and provide a valuable perspective of what I was observing then and what I think today.

And, that brings to me to why this post.

What matters today in 2020 is different in many ways than 2013 or what will matter 7 years from now in 2027.

In fact, 7 years ago, some of the most important people in my life today didn't even exist.

As you get older (and maybe wiser), you realize while the destinations keep changing, it's the constant journey that remains the same.

Now that I'm spending more time in front of a computer than in front of a smartphone for a change, I'll try to share more on the blog as we head back to the future and whatever the new normal is ahead.