I agree that "medium/long-form writing's future is unthreatened", but I'm less sure that blogs are the answer long-term. They're one particular way of publishing, which has pros and cons. Blogs' strengths are: a relatively low barrier to entry, a convenient way for regular readers to follow updates, and not much overhead in thinking about how to maintain a "website" in the traditional sense. Everything is just a new blog post, and at most you slap a few tags on them. Blogs' weaknesses are a strong focus on recency and lack of content organization. Everything is about the recent blog posts. Archives are often hard to use, and many blogs freely mix long-lasting things like essays, with short-form daily-life types of things or comments on current events with a short shelf-life.
An alternative is to separate out several kinds of writing. Paul Graham has an 'essays' page, for example, which is sort of like a blog, but less focused on timeliness and updates. Only essays get posted there, and the focus is not primarily on which essay is most recent (old essays don't quickly scroll off the main page into the archive, for example).
In my own writing, I've come to the conclusion that if I had a blog, it would contain two main kinds of entries: 1) essays I've written, and 2) references to interesting things I've seen written elsewhere. At least for my personal interests, I would prefer those to be separate, and also would prefer them to take more of the flavor of "building a website" rather than "updating a blog". That is, the focus is on the accumulated content, which you can read in any order, not necessarily the order I happened to add it. This is partly because I suspect most people who will run across it aren't ardent mjn fans waiting for my latest update.
So what I've done is have two sections:
1. Essays, which are organized primarily by subject rather than date, but do also have an RSS feed and show recent additions at the top, for my friends/acquaintances/colleagues who might read regularly: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/
2. Snippets/clippings, where I collect interesting excerpts I've run across. If I had a blog, these would get interspersed with the long-form posts, but I prefer having them separate in a sort of digital scrapbook, for the moment fairly unorganized: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/
I'm not saying that method is the best organizational method either, but so far I like it more than a blog. I suppose part of it is that my thinking on online writing is still heavily influenced by some of the 80s/90s hypertext ideas, and "maintaining a website" versus "blogging". Websites often had an /updates.html page where you could see what was recently added, but that wasn't the main interface. The main interface had some kind of rational organization, rather than assuming reverse chronological order of addition is the universal organizational framework.
I noticed a similar usage in my case too. that's two different type of writings. 1. Medium sized thoughts/posts(not really essays, just a few connections i made while reading.around 500 words or so.) and 2. Pithy 1 or 2 sentence comment along with a link. The latter cases tend to be posted usually from my phone.
On blog, not being a good place for long-form writing. I have begun to realize that, i should write the long-forms without thinking about the publishing medium to pay attention to the meaningful long-form.
Infact hate a MS Word s/w for the same reason. and even writing on my 750words page is mostly just a brain dump not coherent. Think vim might be best chance at focused long-form writing.
-- Disclaimer: not an expert in long form essay writings.
An alternative is to separate out several kinds of writing. Paul Graham has an 'essays' page, for example, which is sort of like a blog, but less focused on timeliness and updates. Only essays get posted there, and the focus is not primarily on which essay is most recent (old essays don't quickly scroll off the main page into the archive, for example).
In my own writing, I've come to the conclusion that if I had a blog, it would contain two main kinds of entries: 1) essays I've written, and 2) references to interesting things I've seen written elsewhere. At least for my personal interests, I would prefer those to be separate, and also would prefer them to take more of the flavor of "building a website" rather than "updating a blog". That is, the focus is on the accumulated content, which you can read in any order, not necessarily the order I happened to add it. This is partly because I suspect most people who will run across it aren't ardent mjn fans waiting for my latest update.
So what I've done is have two sections:
1. Essays, which are organized primarily by subject rather than date, but do also have an RSS feed and show recent additions at the top, for my friends/acquaintances/colleagues who might read regularly: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/
2. Snippets/clippings, where I collect interesting excerpts I've run across. If I had a blog, these would get interspersed with the long-form posts, but I prefer having them separate in a sort of digital scrapbook, for the moment fairly unorganized: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/
I'm not saying that method is the best organizational method either, but so far I like it more than a blog. I suppose part of it is that my thinking on online writing is still heavily influenced by some of the 80s/90s hypertext ideas, and "maintaining a website" versus "blogging". Websites often had an /updates.html page where you could see what was recently added, but that wasn't the main interface. The main interface had some kind of rational organization, rather than assuming reverse chronological order of addition is the universal organizational framework.