Forget Social Media and Start Blogging on Google Doc
When social media tires me out, I always feel better when switching to one-to-one or group chats. But I never thought of this method using Gareth’s advice : write a “blog post” in a cloud document and share it with a select group of friends. Inventor and engineer Star Simpson calls this “lazy blogging”; investor Kevin Kwok calls this “private notes.” It’s like creating your own tightly controlled temporary social network, and it’s as simple as sharing a Google doc:
Easier than blogging
To write a lazy blog, just open a Google Doc (or Dropbox Paper Doc, or any cloud-based document service with sharing), jot down some thoughts, and invite friends or colleagues to read and comment. You can control whether people can comment or even edit your document; you can follow who opens the document. You have all the control that’s built into collaboration apps like Google Docs, and you already know how to use them.
Lazy blogging is a low commitment as opposed to blogging or e-mailing newsletters. You can only do this once, without any pressure to start a streak or “build an audience.” You don’t need to learn a CMS or create a web page. You don’t need to know what Medium is.
There is no need to earn likes, reposts, subscribers or “applause”. There is some pressure to start a discussion-healthy kind of pressure that is less about affirmation and more about real interaction. The kind of “conversation” that all social media aspire to, when in fact they are targeting your personal data.
If you want, you can go back and add to the same document. Or you can drop it and start another. It would be fun to have several sessions at the same time. And hopefully you will inspire a friend to invite you to their place. (As with parties and night games, everyone wants to be invited, but no one wants to perform and host. Such is life.)
More fun than chat and email
Chats and group chats are important, but sometimes you want to collect your thoughts and say something longer than a couple of lines at a time. You may need a location that is slightly less dependent on timely responses. Or, at least once, you may want to nudge the conversation in one direction more than the text. You might want a monologue.
You can do this in your email correspondence. Group email threads are great as long as there is at least one nice thing in your inbox and we recommend that you write emails to all your friends and family from time to time . But then you either hide all recipients from each other in BCC, which may seem overly business-like, or invite branched conversations where people selectively respond to parts of the group until you end up responding to the wrong part of the conversation and accidentally insulting someone. into his virtual face.
More private than blog or social media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and even Snapchat love to nudge you to share with all your friends at once or with the entire Internet. If you don’t want to mess with your sharing settings every time you post, you end up with an aunt leaving inappropriate, sharp comments about a career upgrade, or harassing someone Rando whose bio says, “Father. Husband. It is regrettable. Bestseller in West Indianapolis for five consecutive years. “
But on your lazy blog, you get to choose who to share with. It will take you as long as it does on Facebook, but there is a big difference: on social media, you will see a ton of acquaintances that you can add, and you will have to choose who to ignore. In a cloud document, you start from scratch and continue to grow. Google might try to suggest adding a few people, but it’s still a less tedious process. It is not so much a selection of main courses from an extensive menu as a selection of spices to add to one dish.
There are no rules
If you’ve ever joined a less established social network like Ello, or Secret, or Mastodon, or accidentally got caught up in a correspondence with a random response to all emails, you’ve felt like “things are going” tough when you play online. – a space where there is no Unspoken rules of behavior have not been developed. It’s the online equivalent of a night out.
You can get this feeling from lazy blogging. It is a social network filled with only the people you choose. You can write for a random group of friends, or chat with multiple groups of friends, or even write a memo in a professional setting for your peers and colleagues.
You can make it completely private, or let people invite new commenters, or even let anyone with a link join. We recommend being very private, at least the first time – that’s kind of a gist. And yet be a little careful what you say. This is not the place to divulge state secrets. Maybe start with a personal document about which shows are good and which are bad! Try to talk about something small where everyone can have a good time. Throw a small party in the cloud. If not, you might as well blog.