Disposable Content

Recently someone told me I should write coffee shop reviews. As with most advice prefaced with the word should, it was bad advice. I’ll explain why later, but first a little history.

I’ve had a personal website since 1995 and been “blogging” since 1996. Yet if you look at the archives on this site you will only see posts going back to December 2005. What happened to the 1,000+ posts that used to exist on this blog? Deleted. I may have saved about 5 posts from that era, but I deleted the rest. Why? The content was my immediate response to something happening in the world on that day or that week. Disposable. In retrospect my blog at the time was akin to the modern Facebook or Twitter feed. A bunch of crap.

I do not like to write reviews. My experience with a coffee or coffee shop is just one customer experience on one day. It may or may not be predictive of overall quality.

Sometimes I forget how much I dislike writing opinion pieces, but as soon as I start to type the sentences don’t flow. I don’t even like to write book reviews. I’d prefer to pull out a few lessons from the book and extend the discussion. Reviews are important, but even the best ones have a shelf life. I’ve done disposable content. It isn’t for me. That is one of the reasons I stopped posting about finance. The content quickly becomes stale and useless.

Photo by Jens Schott Knudsen

When I relaunched this site 9 years ago, I decided I would no longer be a yet another smart ass blogger responding to the world. I didn’t want to spend another year or several years creating disposable content.

There is way too much disposable content on the internet. Although as a reader I sometimes get value from the quick and current articles, I want to minimize the amount I create. I’d rather focus on posts that still have value a year or 10 years later. I don’t always succeed, but I think I am getting better.