Well… sort of!

When I started blogging back in 2012, I wasn’t sure how long it would last…but over 700 posts and more than a couple million views later Virtualization is Life! is still going! The thing is, that the world has shifted a little and blogging seems to have become a less attractive means to learn and consume information than what it was when web 2.0 was taking off. Content creation has shifted to other mediums such as video and voice with a lot of people now consuming content via the likes of YouTube, PodCasts and social media platforms like TikTok. While I still fundamentally believe in the power of blogs as a source of content for the technology community, it has become clear that, for whatever reason it has lost some traction. Even I have found myself reading less and viewing/listing more!

With that, today I launched the sister podcast to this blog, Virtualization if Life!. Hosted on Anchor.fm and distributed across all major PodCast platforms.

The idea is to marry up blog posts to podcast episodes. As blog posts are created, there will be accompanying podcast to give some verbal context around what is contained in the blog post.

In this launch post/episode, I talk a little about the idea behind this, how i was inspired by the Acquired Podcast and the reason behind trying something new in this ever changing world of content and content creation! So the idea is to also offer the guts of the blog content as a short, sharp podcast. This will mean that a Podcast will be embedded into the post… as it is above, and I will try to translate the content into PodCast format.

A Podcast Inspiring another Podcast:

I can’t speak highly enough about the Acquired Podcast… it’s got a huge listener base for a reason and Ben and David are masters at story telling… they are also master at helping seed ideas and it was out on a walk this afternoon, listening to the last episode on Andreessen Horowitz where I got the idea to try something different and new for Virtualization is Life! Towards the end of the episode, they talked about how Ben Horowitz had a popular blog and poured himself out on Twitter during the early 2010s at the height of the Web 2.0 boom…

They also embrace (as users) web 2.0, and that’s a big part of web 2.0? It’s blogging. The Pmarca blog and Ben’s blog, this is where it all starts… very much embracing the idea that if I’m going to be allowed on the internet. I am going to share my thoughts with the world.

And that got me thinking that just like I embraced blogging (and Twitter) at the start… I need to embrace with fuller force the new platforms to share my thoughts to the world.

The Pandemic’s Impact on Content:

YouTubers and Podcasters have been on the up and up for a number of years and those that have invested their time in building followings had done very very well even before COVID19 impacted the way in which we all generally interact with technology. Being forced to work from home has meant that we consume content all day, every day… and for most people, the easiest way to break away from reading endless walls of text is to watch or listen to content. Since the internet was born (and for a long time before) people interacted with and exchanged ideas with text and pictures, but there is no doubt recent generations are more tuned into dynamic visual video and voice based content.

I’ve been speaking to a lot of bloggers since this started and almost everybody’s traffic stats have levelled out, or have fallen. I’ve seen about a 20% drop in overall traffic from my peak. While it might just be my content, it seems like a combination of Google changing its algorithm, along with the pandemic burn out, there has been a shift as discussed.

New Technology Platforms:

As a new generation of technologies is accelerated by the pandemic, so to is a new generation of content, and while I still know there are lots of very good bloggers out there producing great content in and around the infrastructure/virtualization/automation/cloud world the new world of developers and cloud native seem to learn and consume differently as well. I’m sure blogging will continue, and I don’t intent to stop blogging on technologies that interest me, including the new wave of modern application platforms as I have been doing for a number of years now.

In any case, lets see how this goes… it’s not only an experiment in new form content, but also an experiment in the mashing together of two mediums.