Interest in blogging over time: Blogging is still far below its historical peak, when analysing trends across a longer hoizon, but its recent rebound is statistically unusual relative to the last five-year baseline. Google Trends do not represent not raw search volume. Each point is divided by total searches for that geography/time window and scaled 0-100, so the spike means “blog” became much more prominent relative to all searches, not that we know absolute search count. That said, the spikes are interesting to investigate with context.

In August 2025 we see a spike coinciding with the launch month of GPT-5 and the month that Google AI Mode went global, raising SEO questions. Substack raised $100m round C at a $1.1bn valuation in July 2025, surpassing 5m paid subscriptions earlier in 2025. Then, in November 2025, Medium changed its monetisation system, stronger writing models were released, and AI search continued to escalate.

By January 2026, X had both the product surface and a massive financial incentive for long-form writing. X announced a $1m prize for the top Article.

Blogging interest appears to have re-rated because AI made writing cheaper. AI search threatened old blog traffic. Changes to search would surface more “relevant, satisfying content” across site types. Platforms started paying or rewarding long-form content.

Why I started blogging.

Not for any of those reasons.

It probably is worth learning the basics of SEO, web analytics, information architecture, CMS plumbing, and how content moves through search and social distribution. Who knows when, in the future, I may need to reach people with a topic, a product, or an idea that solves a real problem in the world.

But for the meantime, I mostly started blogging as a personal exercise.

If anything, it is a conscious practice against the increasingly effortless ability to generate content with AI. And, to adhere to the practice of an important personal rule, to create more than I consume. My argument is not that ai-generated content is bad. Some of the highest-performing articles from the X competition almost certainly leveraged AI, and many of them read incredibly well. My argument is not even the obvious one: what happens to our brains when we stop thinking for ourselves?

What I have noticed is more subtle. I feel an urge to lean on these tools. Sometimes that is exactly what we should do. Repetitive tasks, formatting, summarisation, low-cognitive-load admin. Outsource it. Free the mind. Slowly the urge spreads to unload my thinking effort onto these tools too. When designing a large-scale project for work in Claude Code, organising multiple skills, workflows, and agents, my first instinct was to provide the end goal, turn on auto-mode, and wait for the final system to magically manifest. This does not work well - architectural decisions, trade-offs, system boundaries, and connectivity between moving parts still seem to sit on the weaker side of these tools. The model can help you build, but it cannot always decide what should exist. It can accelerate execution, but it cannot fully replace taste, judgement, or structural thinking. I have felt the whisper of unloading cognitive effort, and it scares me. Because the whole point of freeing ourselves from repetitive work should be to in aid of freeing mindspace to DO more of the thinking.

Ok… so, why blog?

Because I need to train the ability to think, draw conclusions, share my interests, and build in public. Like training in the gym, this is not something I can outsource and still expect to keep the muscle.

I have mentioned before my fascination with how writing changes when it is intended to be shared publicly. The same thought feels different when it is private. Once it is exposed to other people, it has to survive outside the atmosphere of my own mind.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron introduces the practice of Morning Pages: three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing, first thing in the morning. I am pretty sure the practice is meant to be done pen to paper, but nevertheless, I have felt more creativity and clarity the more I dabble in writing these posts and imagining the direction this could take.

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Cool things I found this week…

I. Documentary

image

II. wooden laptop for outdoor computing

III. open-source computational drug discovery pipeline for Chagas disease

github.com /crisprking/cruzain-in-silico-pipeline

IIV. The cutest “coffee shop effect” website for visual anchoring whilst working

cafe.pauwee.com /