Hello again! It’s been a while, and I missed you all.
It’s true, I have been away from writing blogs for quite a while. I mean, I was living life – I moved to a new country, got a job, left the job, we all survived COVID-19, started my company, and had two babies. It’s a lot, right? But I’m here now, back to what I always loved to do. It was more than just life that caused my unplanned hiatus. As someone who could be considered a “dinosaur” in the blogging world, I lived through the start of the blogging industry. I was there when Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram first launched (I’m really showing my age here). Blogging and social media were my life for a big chunk of my adult life. It still is, but in a different way. I feel like I went around the world and back to where I started. Like the Hobbit, I can title my saga “There and Back Again”.
Why did I start the blog and why did I love it?
In the beginning, everyone wrote their travel stories because that was the idea behind starting a blog. That was the reason why I started my blog: to share my travel stories with others, because I was too different from people in my life at the time and blogging seemed like a great way to share my experiences. Bloggers in the community quickly formed friendships around the world, read each other’s blogs like weekly columns, and shared our experiences. I found ‘my people’ who lived in faraway places but shared similar values and worldviews. I even married one! It was exhilarating and a profound pivot point in my adult life. The blog that started as a personal outlet became a business and allowed me to travel the world. I traveled slowly, with intentions, fueled by stories and human connections. I didn’t choose “the best” places or the most well-known destinations. Visiting the most countries didn’t matter to me. I went back to the same place many times simply because I loved it and found meaningful connections. Serendipity was a big part of it. Sometimes projects led me there. Or it was because of someone I knew or stories I heard. I wrote a lot about those stories, mostly based on my personal experiences. For a good ten years, that was my day-to-day life. Travel, photograph, meet people, learn about other cultures, learn more about myself through all these experiences, write about it, and repeat.
As the monetization of blogging and social media became a big part of the whole content creation industry, things started to change. Soon, everyone had to consistently fight with the Google algorithms, trying to get more views than others. To get attention, people started to write clickbait-style titles and share more intimate, private details, which were all out of character for me and never felt right to do so. Another way to get the views and clicks was focusing on search words. SEO became the key to everything. Writing about stories around my personal experiences seemed to have no value in terms of search engine optimization. My stories were more about connecting with the readers through sharing stories from the people I met on the road than getting clicks on a search engine. I never did one of the “top 10”s or “the best” or “the only” type of posts, and I wasn’t going to start. As I said before, it never felt genuine to me. I haven’t been everywhere around the world; how could I say it was “the best”, right?
After the industry moved into the term “influencer”, I felt even more discouraged for the same reasons. It might be a more encouraging way to share your personal views than writing SEO based blog articles, but still you had to fit in with the trends and be “clickable”. Are those cookie-cutter social media posts really worth it for the brands? Are they providing genuine information and human emotion that’s inspiring to others?
Culmination of everything and the life stuff- that’s the reason I was away from blogging. I felt discouraged from writing personal stories because basically the industry (or Google) said those weren’t worth the clicks. Those weren’t sellable.
And of course, then the AI arrived. Generative AI can create articles with a few prompts. It may not be the best, but it does the job, right? When you put in search words in Google, the results are AI reviews rather than blog posts or websites. So after fighting with Google to be on the top search result pages, now we have to fight with AI. When does this end?
Generative AI can write blog posts about destinations, and it can even create one of those “top 10” posts by sourcing (stealing) information from others. But you know what AI can’t do? Write a personal story. It can never write or convey the emotions I felt while witnessing a fall whaling in Utqiagvik, Alaska, or the power of mana I felt from Moai statues in Easter Island. Or describe the taste of sour but buttery flavor of kumis in Kyrgyzstan, or why I think you should visit Moldova, or the overwhelming emotions I felt while visiting the burning ghat in Varanasi, India. This realization was one sliver of encouragement and inspiration that sparked me to come back to what I loved.
Based on the reports, AI companies are buying books, splitting the pages to scan all the words. Just like how we started as children, the machines are learning from books too, because they know that’s where human intelligence comes from. They may also be scanning our stories to learn how to be more human, but in fact, they cannot do what we can do best: connect with each other.
We don’t know how AI is going to change the world, yet. We don’t know how the search engines will change, too. But one thing is clear: we cannot let the machines and algorithms dictate what we write. I know optimizing your content is important because if you have no audience, who are we writing for? But there is always a balance to keep without compromising the heart of the story. An article full of keywords and buzzwords doesn’t have any heart. It never will. We shouldn’t trying to be like machines. Let’s continue telling our stories the way people can. Listen and learn from each other. Be unique. Be you because that’s more important than any keywords or algorithms or trends. I am going to do the same. This was a bit of rambling but I guess that’s the point. So thank you for sticking with me, thanks for being part of my journey so far and the future. I am glad to be connected with you again. Here we go, here’s to a new phase of blogging (for me)!