This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It's hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes.
I am often asked what the end game is for this blog. What am I hoping to get out of it? The truth is there is no real end game. I like reading and writing. I like being constantly curious about the world. I like discipline. I like meeting and connecting with new people. And I like having my own little place on the internet, however small it may be.
I get dozens of emails each week from people and companies wanting to pay for sponsored posts on this blog. I'm not sure how legitimate these inbounds are, but I ignore all of them. That's not what this blog is for or about.
In the early days of writing this blog it was called Architect This City and the focus was a bit narrower: real estate, design, planning and all things cities. That is still more or less the case, but I do often stray from these topics. Sometimes into personal topics. Sometimes into my photography. And more recently into the world of crypto and blockchains. This is one of the reasons why I decided to move to just blogging under my own name. There's more flexibility.
Sidebar: I recently bought my first NFT -- a CryptoBabyPunk. I'm not at all suggesting that you should do the same. It could be worthless in the future. But I continue to be fascinated by what's happening in this space and I've committed myself to experimenting and learning a lot more.
Writing something each day is extremely difficult. Some days it only takes 15-20 minutes. And other days, when I'm not in the mood or I'm exhausted from doing too many other things, it can take over an hour. It's a big time commitment and on more than one occasion I've questioned whether my time was better spent elsewhere. But then I think about all of the benefits that I derive from this daily practice.
They say that the definition of a habit is that you don't feel normal until you've done it. And this blog has certainly become a habit of mine. It forces me to wake up every morning and consider at least one interesting thing that may be happening in our cities and our world. I don't intend to stop anytime soon. So thank you all for reading over the years.
Today is the 4 year anniversary of this daily blog.
Sure, I’ve missed a few days over the years (my estimate is 4-5 days), but for the most part I have shown up here every day and written something.
Sometimes that something is very short and/or bad. I’ve had a few people say to me: “I can tell when you’re super busy. Your posts are shorter.” I’m okay with that. Part of this exercise for me is simply about the discipline. 80% of success is showing up, right?
In some ways, what I do here is an anachronism. Here is a good vintage article (2011) that talks about two different schools of thought when it comes to blogging.
The reality is that it’s painfully slow and difficult to build an online audience via a personal blog using your own domain. It takes years, unless you’re a celebrity, which I am most certainly not. That’s why many people give up.
Instead, many people/influencers choose to build their audience on top of an existing network, such as YouTube, Instagram, or Medium. Medium is pretty tempting and I’ve seen lots of bloggers port over their personal blogs.
The idea here is that you simply bring your content to where your/an audience already lives, instead of trying to get them to come to you.
Of course, one of the risks of this approach is that you don’t own/control the platform. What if people one day decided to stop using MySpace? I like the idea of owning (at least part of) my online presence.
So here’s to another year on the blog. Thanks for reading! I really do appreciate it. Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.
As I approach one year of ATC and as people like Lockhart Steele (founder of Curbed and Eater) return to personal blogging, I wanted to share something that’s been on my mind for almost this entire last year. And that is, should ATC just be a personal blog or should there be some greater end goal?
Right now it’s a bit of a hybrid. It’s hosted at brandondonnelly.com, but along the way I created a somewhat independent Architect This City brand. The most obvious option is to continue to grow ATC and turn it into something like Curbed, This Big City, or Sustainable Cities Collective. In fact, a good friend of mine emailed me a few weeks ago and asked me why I’m not doing that.
But to do that would require a lot more time and many more posts a day. It would also mean more restrictions on what I can, or should, write about. Personal blogs are, well, personal. Branded blogs typically require a focus. Today I live comfortably in between both of those worlds. I write almost exclusively about city building, but I introduce many personal touches. Architect This City has become my personal brand.
In many ways, I feel like this tension is a natural one. With the rise of social media and the belief that “everybody is their own media company”, more and more people are finding themselves debating whether or not they should position themselves personally online or create an independent brand.
At the same time, blogging is evolutionary. It’s a laboratory. And most of the benefits are entirely indirect. Writing helps you get your ideas on “paper” and sort through them publicly. And sometimes that leads to unexpected outcomes. I mean, in the case of Lockhart, he started blogging about his Lower East Side neighborhood and that gave birth to Curbed, which he then sold to Vox Media.
So as much as I try and plan out where I think blogging everyday could take me, it’s also good to sit back, enjoy the ride, and just see where it takes me.