Blogging: An Evolution Over 20 Years

"Words. Concepts. Strategies.," which was sometimes called the Copywrite, Ink. blog started in 2005, was the same year the first blogger received White House press credentials, The Huffington Post was founded, and YouTube was launched. It was nine years after the first blog was created by Justin Hal in 1994, which meant I was a latecomer to blogging but still an early adopter.

I remember telling students about the blog in my Writing for Public Relations course at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Many were working professionals in the field, trying to navigate how to write a decent news release that wasn't automatically filed in the trash can. 

My company wrote scores of news and feature releases in those days, which populated many newspapers, magazines, and trade journals. It was relatively easy work compared to advertising campaigns, mainly because I always approached the business of public relations (in part) like a journalist. Simply put, journalists want good stories, so public relations practitioners should be keen on providing great ones.

They understood the point, but not the next one I made in 2005. Even then, I saw the writing on the wall. 

"The importance of business blogs shouldn't be underestimated," I told them. "While you can sometimes get your message out through the media, you can always get it out on a blog."

They laughed in 2005. Nobody laughed in 2010. Nowadays, blogs have become so integrated and essential for websites that some people wonder if standalone blogs matter anymore when compared to the more common methods of engagement—social networks like Facebook, Threads, Instgram, BlueSky, X, etc. or video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. 

What's The Takeaway After 20 Years of Blogging. 

Admittedly, sometimes I wonder if it's fair to say I've been blogging for 20 years here, given how sporadic I've been with any new material. While this used to be a daily between 2007 and 2010, I've struggled to meet the minimum — one post-every-month goal — that I set in 2016. Maybe this will be the year I hit it! 

It's not for lack of creating content. I'm engaged daily on social networks and produce two or more videos a week across multiple channels. I also write blog posts for other companies — most of which read like articles with varied degrees of formality. 

Most of the other people I used to engage with on blogs have moved on, too. If they write anything, it's likely to appear on LinkedIn or Medium instead of a blog. And, more likely, they mention whatever they used to write about in podcasts and vodcasts, having abandoned their blogs long ago. 

I even wrote about that one. For all those who once dreamed their words of wisdom would be permanently etched into the Internet, it turned out that all they really created was a 404 crisis — thousands of once interlinked posts now lead nowhere. On occasion, I'm even asked why I bother, given that I could probably put my url to better use as an author website. Except ...

This blog has about 3.8 million views and about 30,000 visits a month, whether I add new content or not. The traffic is primarily the result of more than 1,700 posts, many of which are more akin to articles. And for everyone who visits and opts for the way it looks on the web, they can easily find other ways to connect or find my books. In sum, it would be crazy to give it up. It makes much more sense to add to it, here and there, when I have some time. And when it makes sense. 

What are some of the top most-read articles on this blog? 

Knowing When To Post | 17k reads. This was one of my first living case studies on why not everybody was right for the blogging world. Every now and again, the post surges when someone wants to understand the early social media crisis sparked by one company. 

Signing Books: Five Places I Visited For 50 States | 16.6k reads. It's a story about the bookstores I visited during my first year as an author. I still need to write one up pertaining to the national book tour I took last year. Who knows? Maybe next month. 

The Elephant In The Room Of Banned Books | 15.3k reads. This post remains relevant for two reasons. First, because people keep banning books, which is as stupid as it is sad. Second, the point of the article was to illustrate it isn't a red-blue issue. Everybody is up for banning what they don't like. 

Writing Books: Third Wheel As A Debut Novel | 11.7k reads. This post should answer the question many authors ask regularly. Would starting a blog be worth it? Granted, this blog is 20 years old. However, seeing that two of the top five posts are related to my books, I'd say there is something to it. 

Being Steve Jobs: Where The Open Forum Got It Wrong | 10.7k reads. My well-read rebuttal to an American Express article continues to be read and referenced as I made the case that, yes, business owners do want to be like Steve Jobs. Sure, they don't want to be exactly like him. But there was plenty to learn. 

Incidentally, the Steve Jobs and Third Wheel posts are among the top reads in the last 12 months, with 5.45k and 3.29 reads, respectively. Others that always get traction include If 80 Percent of People Won't Change, Why Force Them?, Revealing Weakness: Brian Solis On Authority, and Understanding Viewers.: TV's New Consumers. The latter is one of many articles I wrote about a television show called Jerico, which was canceled only because it had the misfortune of being launched during the dawn of streaming services. 

Nowadays, networks and streaming services would love to have that audience. (The same could be said for Veronica Mars and The Black Donnellys, too). And that brings me to another reason I'll keep this blog around. It is a a written history as it happened — personal, global, and within the blogosphere.

And with that, I will end on one final point. I miss the days when banging out a post in an hour to start my day was part of the routine. It was fun and exciting to see them catch people's interest. But more than that, there was a note of civility and sometimes even chivalry during the golden age of blogs. 

Words weren't so easily tossed about like quips and clubs and weapons, nor were they so easily thrown away. Reputation seemed to matter, and responses were well reasoned. I think we could use a bit more of that today instead of always shooting for the soundbite. Alas, that, too, is part of history.

Fact Checking: The End Of An Experiment

Some writers have the ability to put one word in front of another and make whatever they write about feel as real as if it happened. Great literary writers do it out of habit. The best copywriters, myself included, are trained to weave whatever differential facts they are given with fantasy to make a brand story come to life. And journalists, although the public likes to pretend otherwise, frequently chase down whatever theories they have in their heads before they ever begin to write. 

Sure, people think stories are supposed to land in the laps of journalists out of convenience, but that's not true. Most stories are fabricated out of thin air, with journalists chasing hunches, for better or worse. We mostly hope it will be for the better, but often, it's for the worse or, more precisely, something in between.

All stories are made by the tellers.

The very first article I ever wrote was not much more than speculation. I was a university student enrolled in a basic reporting class when a 6-foot-8 football player injured two security guards at a fraternity party. One of the wounded guards had his face slashed when he was thrown through a window. 

Since the fraternity was sanctioned by the university and the Greek house was on the university grounds, I wondered whether the school could be held liable. To prove my hunch, I called more than a half dozen attorneys until I found one willing to be quoted. He said, simply put, that any decent attorney could bring a liability suit against the school. It was couched in the idea that any attorney could sue anybody for anything, but I left that part out when I talked to other sources. 

I also left the part out when I learned what was said by asking the coordinator of campus standards what she thought. She said she feared the lawyer was right, especially because all events that serve alcohol must be approved by the fraternity's adviser, her office, and the university president. Without a waiver of liability, at minimum, even the idea that the event would even need security guards was an admission. 

It was a great story, but one that never sat well with me despite being the reporter. I had opened up a can of worms because of what had occurred at the frat party despite no liability suit ever being filed. And worse, several people who trusted me enough to speak candidly found themselves in hot water. 

Yes, anyone can assume that new policies must be made. But that's not the point of this piece. I want to offer it as evidence that facts are not magical truths but malleable constructs. Even someone with a college sophomore's worth of experience can do it in a few hours. Despite no liability suit in existence, the article I wrote resembled fact, even if it remained untested in court. 

Facebook's policy change is the right course. 

I have many friends who are fearful of Facebook's upcoming policy changes on fact-checking. They think Facebook and other Meta platforms will descend into a misinformation free-for-all akin to what they think happened on X when Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. 

"It's time to get back to our roots around free expression. We're replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes," said Mark Zuckerberg in his video. 

My view is slightly different, but then again, I was one of the mistakes Zuckerberg is talking about. My original Facebook account was shut down by fact checkers who mistook fictional stories as political statements. Specifically, when the network's strict policy was implemented, it retroactively lit my account up like a Christmas tree because some of the characters in my stories were wrong or politically incorrect or whatever. And unfortunately for me, neither the algorithm nor the fact checkers could tell the difference. Their decision would be akin to All In The Family being taken off the air for whatever Archie said. 

It was a painful experience, largely because I had years of personal memories attached to the account, alongside 1,400 people eagerly awaiting my debut novel. My connections to them were gone overnight. 

The state of media today isn't always a matter of fact. 

Technology is an excellent and crazy thing. Every day, today's journalists do just what I did as a college student except with a zillion times more efficiency. They use platforms to call for experts on this subject or those with very specific beliefs. Then, they elevate those voices to weave together stories with all the strength of reality. Those stories, in turn, are then used to silence other stories that are either late to the party or slanted away from a preferred narrative. 

Fundamentally, this is what was wrong with third-party fact checking all along. People operated with different facts, and then fact checkers used their biases to decide which might be right, even if none were correct or much more than a theory. 

Even some of Meta's own employees struggle to see this as problematic, saying that Meta is "sending a bigger, stronger message to people that facts no longer matter, and conflating that with a victory for free speech.” But they are wrong. 

Facts do still matter. But the Internet has to work out that the pendulum went too far in one direction by building a foundation of "facts" that weren't really facts and then judging all other evidence or speculation or theory against a fabricated set of standards. As Mark Twain once said: “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable." And words, I might add, are even more pliable than that, given how much bodies of fiction — in books and film and online — shape our moral compasses. 

Give the policy change its day. You might be surprised to find that the old adage about free speech that I learned as a journalist will hold true: The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race. 

Producing Video: A Shift In Content Creation

Last year, video accounted for over 82 percent of all web traffic, with TikTok boasting 1.04 billion active users and YouTube setting the high bar at 2.6 billion. Latecomer Facebook Reels is just under 620 million. 

These numbers represent a significant shift from when blogs were content drivers ten years ago. So, while blogs and articles still play an essential role in SEO and easily digested nonlinear content, video isn't something to dismiss. While traveling on my Late Summer National Book Tour in August, I learned just how important video content can be.

I teed up every bookstore signing with a video shot the day before while on the road. Views for these videos ranged from 1,251 to 2,984 on TikTok and 1,081 to 1,688 on Facebook Reels. On TikTok, the least viewed was at the Lee's Legendary Marble Museum in York, Nebraska, and the most viewed was The Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Ironically, The Gateway Arch was the least viewed, and Lee's Legendary Marble Museum was the most viewed on Reels. 

The real test was more tangible than views. Some readers expressly mentioned the videos at the signing, especially in Nebraska — something that stuck with me long after I returned home, which is why I've since invested in making more video content. 

New Video Content Highlights 

60-Second Writing Tips: I'm sharing a 60-second writing tip every Monday. The tips will likely alternate between very general tips, like which style book to use, and very specific tips, like using possessive pronouns to improve clarity. Since returning from the tour, I've already produced five videos. 

Inside The Audiobook: Two of my books were released as audiobooks and narrated by the incredibly talented Brian Callanan. In the weeks ahead, starting with Third Wheel, I'll share a highlight of something from each chapter or story and share a narrated sample from the audiobook. The first few chapters are up. 

Behind the Writer's Desk: Every few weeks, I'll highlight one of my current projects or discuss my writing process. The first episode discusses part one of a story that will appear in my upcoming newsletter, Scraps by Rich Becker. 

Upcoming Interviews and Shout-Outs: In addition to those mentioned above, I'm currently experimenting with several formats to host a new interview series with special guests. I'll share more about this new monthly (or so) series in the weeks ahead. Likewise, I'll give shout-outs to bookstores and more on TikTok and Facebook Reels in the days ahead, anything I can do to help my friends and associates.

Other Content Found Around The Web 

While some of the video content still has a few rough edges while I become more comfortable with it, it's only a matter of time before everything clicks. In fact, to help me become more comfortable on the other side of the screen, I recently put my name out as an actor for fun and was cast in a commercial and short film within weeks.

While there is an uptick in video content overall, I'm still active on many social networks, publish a newsletter, and sometimes devise other ways to share content. For example, an interactive Google map highlights where readers can find signed copies of my books or libraries with copies to check out. This site will eventually average an article a month again. 

The point is pretty simple. Different content deserves different media. It has always been this way and will likely always be this way. Creatives need to create content that best serves the people they want to reach in a way they want to be reached. So, with that in mind, I hope to see you!

Signing Books: Late Summer Book Tour

My daughter played her last travel softball game a few weeks ago. It's surreal to think, given I once wrote about her in the context of overcoming hurdles. Yet, here we are: Weeks away from taking a road trip to her college, where her next game will be at the collegiate level. 

Along the way, I'm hoping she learns a few things, too. Some of what I hope she learns comes full circle to that column I wrote ten years ago. The overemphasis on image, popularity, and crowd thinking in social media life has a long history of undermining good ideas, worthwhile efforts, and individual actions.  

Ten years ago, I wasn't a novelist. I'm on a book tour this summer. 

People tend to ask authors two common questions. First, what advice would you give to any aspiring writers? Second, what was the worst advice you ever received? 

I have a variety of answers to the first question in interviews but the one that stands out the most hit me today. Don't wait. We spend far too much time fretting over reasons not to pursue our passions. 

The second goes hand in hand with the first. Don't start because you'll never finish it is the worst advice I ever received. And if you finish it, they cotninued, no one will ever read it. It doesn't even matter if we hear this bad advice from someone else or that little voice in the back of our head that prefers practicality over aspiration. Don't believe it. I've sold thousands of books.

I've also lined up a book tour that coincides with the trip. We'll take in some sights and stop at bookstores along the way. You can follow us on TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, and elsewhere. Or, even better, drop by if I am in your area (or afterward to snap up a signed copy left behind). Event times will be posted on Facebook as they are finalized. 

Pretour Warmup

July 16: The Book Haven in Prescott Valley, Arizona

Summer Book Tour

August 26: Barnes & Noble Grand Junction (signing) in Grand Junction, Colorado 

August 27: Old Firehouse Books (visit) in Fort Collins, Colorado

August 28: Barnes & Noble SouthPointe (signing) in Lincoln, Nebraska 

August 29: Bumble Books (signing/reading) in Amana, Iowa 

August 31: The Atlas Collective (visit) in Moline, Illinois 

September 2: Wordsmith Bookshoppe (signing) in Galesburg, Illinois

September 3: Spine Indie Bookstore (author showcase) in St. Louis, Missouri 

September 5: Commonplace Books (signing) in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

September 6: Barnes & Noble Coronado (signing) in Albuquerque, New Mexico

September 7: Page 1 Books (signing) in Albuquerque, New Mexico 

Posttour Wrapup 

October 19: Las Vegas Book Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada

Stay tuned. I might be adding another mini-book tour in early October. My sights are set on Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The trip is still tentative, but I hope it will help move my next WIP forward. It's set in Maine and will become my second novel, and fourth or fifth book (depending on what happens in the next few months). Pretty exciting — stuff I would have done sooner had I already carved out time to write fiction alongside client work. And that's the point. 

I've never been happier writing fiction. In fact, doing so has elevated my commercial work too. And that's what I want my daughter to learn before I drop her off at her new home away from home. Don't wait. Be happy. 

Pushing AI: A Reduction In Creativity

In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin praises artificial intelligence (AI). But he doesn’t find its strength in being creative as much as in seeing problems with a fresh perspective.

He highlights AlphaGo’s approach to the game Go as his example. AlphaGo, the first AI to defeat a Go grandmaster, applied a never-seen-before move that no human would have made. Indeed. Most humans saw the move as a mistake when the AI made it, failing to recognize anything beyond the two choices that the grandmaster expected the program to make. But the algorithm didn’t care about 4,000 years of Go history. It was programmed to win. It did. 

Rubin is right in that the AlphaGo win is a teachable moment for human beings. Sometimes, we carry too much emotional, intellectual, and historical baggage around with us to be truly creative. Ergo, divergent thinking is still king when it comes to creativity. 

Divergent thinking is also where the proliferation of AI ceases to interest me. Don’t get me wrong. I still pay attention, especially when my colleagues point it out.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg, who teaches writing at the California College of the Arts, recently did so when he mentioned: “One of the dark pleasures of teaching uncanonical work is reading the AI hallucinations my students think I won’t notice.” 

To be clear, Behm-Steinberg allows AI assistance if his students include their prompts with the work. He says it’s better than forcing them to sneak it into their assignments and then failing them when he spots what he calls AI hallucinations (something nonsensical, akin to those crazy hand defects that litter some graphics). 

I don’t know. After seeing the first official music video made with OpenAI’s Sora on LinkedIn, I still struggle to condone its broader applications that attempt to supplant human creativity. The video is largely unoriginal, with horrible camera angles and bad morphing effects that cause some people motion sickness — AI hallucinations that we can see rather than read. It’s a fail, propped up only by the crutch of AI infancy. 

So, what is the status of AI creativity? There isn’t any. I mean, using AI editors as a prompt to improve sentence structure is one thing, along with applying a photo effect that saves some tedious pixel tweaking or creating elements that can inform a component of a bigger project. Those are suitable solutions. This continued pursuit of trying to make it capture a human’s imagination, on the other hand, is faulty by design.

At its core, the true strength of art in all its forms is one human’s mastery over some medium so they may share their unique perspective of the world with others. These perspectives — a lifetime of experience and knowledge and, sometimes, the purposeful subtraction of said experience and knowledge — is more unique than a human iris. And this is why AI, programmed to mix and match other people’s work, will never truly obtain human creativity — even if it is constructed to be born and live like a human being. Because, even if it were built to be born, then it would still only represent a single point in an infinite ocean of stars. 

No. More likely, AI merely represents a reverse renaissance or a great reduction in creativity. As humans allow machines to copy processes, techniques, and rules, they may become even lazier in the pursuit of original thinking. And it will be only then that AI may succeed in simulating something superior, not because it’s creative but only because we will cease to be. 

Ho hum. I liked it better when programmers focused on teaching AI to wash the dishes and mop the floors so that we could have more time to be creative. Instead, this trend to program AI to be faux creative will only give us more time to wash the dishes and mop the floors. And we’ll all be too dumbed down to even know the difference. Good night and good luck. 

Writing Romance: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

I met my first girlfriend in the third grade. She thought I was a rebel of sorts — a transfer from the public school system, repeating third grade. I wasn’t a rebel. I still couldn’t read.

We were “boyfriend and girlfriend” for three short months. I moved away after the school year ended. 

We might have been “together” longer, but she didn’t know I liked her. I always liked her. 

I finally worked up the courage to let her know how I felt on Valentine’s Day. I wrote it in the Valentine’s Day card I gave her — the biggest one in the box. They always came like that in a class pack. There were 23 or 29 regular Valentine’s Day cards in the box and one (sometimes two) super special ones. I gave her THAT one. 

The only problem was my writing. Because I didn’t read well, I didn’t write well either. So when she opened my card, she wrinkled her nose and joked about how she couldn’t read it. I made a joke about it, too. I didn’t want her to know it came from me. So she didn’t think I liked her because I didn’t give her a card. Or, so she thought. 

My second chance came a month later. We had an auction at the school, and she had donated a tapestry with a Native American on it. She thought it was cool because she was Native American, too. But nobody bid on it. So I did. I bid everything I had, which I didn’t have to do. She got the message. I liked her as much as anybody likes somebody in third grade. 

Love makes you do crazy things, even when you don’t understand it. It’s one part anticipation and two parts relief. There really is someone out there for you, at least until you move away. 

Young love in the novel Third Wheel.

While my novel Third Wheel is often described as a coming-of-age thriller that follows Brady Wilks along the fringe of the 1980s suburban drug scene in Las Vegas, it’s not without heart. In between the tension, Brady pursues two love interests in the book. 

The first is with an 18-year-old named Cheryl. The relationship is immediately problematic because Brady lies about his age, fearing she will lose interest, knowing this is the summer before his sophomore year. Brady won’t celebrate his 15th birthday until late fall.

He meets Cheryl early in the book. She is one of several satellites orbiting the parties hosted by his older friend group. Cheryl has every reason to believe he was in her ballpark — a soon-to-be junior or senior — until his adolescent awkwardness gives him away.

For Brady, he is drawn to the impossibility of the relationship and the promise of emotional stability, filling a void that can’t be found in his unstable life. Cheryl puts his troubles on pause, even if he never understands her interest in him. 

Because the story is told entirely from Brady’s self-centered point of view, most readers don’t either. Everybody’s best guess is that dating someone younger might even the playing field for a recent high school grad in the 1980s. Sure, while the 70s may have moved the needle on gender equality, the 80s dating scene didn’t know it. 

Brady’s perceived rivals drive this point home. They always appear more confident in winning over her attention and affection. With Brady, it’s an internal tug of war. She pulls him toward her and pushes him away at the same time.

She wants it to work but knows it will never work. Maybe Brady feels that way, which is why he leaves himself open for two alcohol- and drug-infused flirtations during the book. One doesn’t amount to anything, but the second one leads to the start of something, even if we never see what exactly that might be. 

Brady meets this second girl, Sandy, in a Mob-owned strip club. Despite working as a server and part-time stripper, Sandy is an underage runaway from California, much closer in age to Brady than the lie she tells him. 

“Twenty-one, hun.” “Beat you by a year,” he lies in return. 

The contrast in these two relationships has more to do with the girls than the boy. When Sandy looks at Brady, she sees a reflection of herself. Despite a facade of self-confidence that initially attracts Brady’s attention, Sandy is just as out of her league as he is out of his. 

Broken people tend to attract broken people, and Sandy is empathetic enough to see he’s broken. Together, being broken feels safe and normal. It leads to something much more casual, comfortable, and accidental. 

Each relationship is different but somehow gives Brady what he needs most when he needs it. That’s how stories go sometimes. 

Love is desperation, anticipation, and infatuation on the front end. It’s affection, acceptance, and attachment on the back end if it lasts long enough. But it rarely lasts long enough because the strongest thing in the world is also the most fragile; hard to find and easy to lose. Cherish every minute before you move away. Happy Valentine’s Day.