It’s been quite a while since I felt the need to have my own blog. Social media took over the landscape and my day job took all of my writing energy, leaving me with no real desire to manage my own website.

My main site has changed over the years, domains have come and gone, the purpose of the site has flipped from a single page that directed people to all of my other channels to a writer’s portfolio and back again.

But I find myself, at the beginning of 2025, missing the ability to write long form content on any subject I feel like. So, with that in mind, I’ve decided to launch this site as a blog.

Social Media and Me

The social media landscape has changed dramatically, though its descent into a terrible experience has been happening for a while. Because of that change I haven’t really been posting anywhere for anything outside of my day job.

I was a reasonably early adopter of Twitter (mid-2007) but it has become such a horrible place since Musk bought the company that I can’t in good conscience continue to use the platform. It’s full of bots, right-wing propaganda and horrible abuse, so I’ve archived my account over there and moved on. I still hold an account because it’s my name, but unless there is a dramatic change, I can’t imagine ever going back.

Facebook isn’t a great experience anymore either. It’s a stream of constant ads and random page updates and now with the latest announcement of fact-checking being removed, it’s going to deteriorate even faster with all of the political nonsense and propoganda that will start showing up.

Instagram is… okay. To a point. I came to the platform for the photography and over the years it’s become a version of TikTok with its focus on reels and video. I have no interest in participating in that (or TikTok) so it’s another platform that I barely use. I’ve cleared almost all of the people I follow from it and now really just use it for the bare minimum. I haven’t posted on it in quite some time. Maybe, I’ll begin using it to post photos again, but I’m not entirely convinced that will happen any time soon.

And, let’s not talk about Threads. It was a good idea at a time when people were looking for a Twitter alternative, but it’s been a constantly below average platform that will get steadily worse with the Meta fact-checking decision.

I use LinkedIn a little for my communications career, but to be honest, that’s mostly consumption and day job related matters. There’s not much else to it for me right now. I can see its potential, but there are some things happening on there which make it less interesting for me in general.

Where can you find me?

BlueSky is the only platform I’m likely to be active on for the forseeable future. It feels a lot like Twitter did back in the earlier years, but I’m so out of the habit of posting for myself that I haven’t really used the account yet.

I like that journalists are beginning to move there and it’s becoming a reliable source of news and information. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll use it for right now, but feel free to follow me if you use it.

This Blog

That brings me back to launching this blog. 

I’ve been contemplating for a while what I wanted to do. I wanted to make this a place where I could write consistently without any restrictions around the topic, but I was also a little conflicted with picking a theme or a niche and writing only in that subject. 

A single subject would be smarter if I had intentions of using this as a specific business tool, but I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that I just don’t care about that. It feels too rigid for me at this point in time. The site is my name and the topics are my interests. It’s that simple.

Ultimately, I needed to stop procrastinating over the decision and just start writing.

Good advice over the years has been to write where there’s already an audience, which is why social media has become the cornerstone of so much of the web. But, the challenge with that, in my opinion, is that you are always at the mercy of the decisions of that company. That company can make decisions you fundamentally disagree with and then you’re left with nothing if you have to move on.

Having your own place on the web that is completely within your control is just smart. I honestly wish I’d never gotten rid of my old site. But, I did. And so here we are starting again.

I’m not going to write for an algorithm, I’ve no interest in that here. Instead, I’ll be jumping around topics and writing about whatever interests me. It could be current affairs, it could be sport, it could be to my communications day job or writing. I don’t know yet.

That flexibility and freedom just feels good. It might take a little while to hit my stride as I’m so used to writing in other people’s voices for my day job that I’ll have to find my own again. But I’m not too concerned about that.

Eventually, I want to write to a schedule and make sure I have some deadlines. I don’t know what that looks like just yet, but I expect that to take shape naturally pretty quickly.

With all of that said, welcome to my new site and my over-caffeinated musing on a variety of topics.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash