Writing About Technology for Living - the Hard Facts

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As any long-time tech blogger realizes, every so often you have to look in the mirror and ask if what you are doing is worthwhile, and making a difference. Please allow us to indulge ourselves this task. 

We have been running 33rd Square for over five years now, and while we do post many guest pieces, the real excitement is still retained for the pieces we are able to write from base ideas, concepts and discussions around the technologies that are coming together that may lead to a technological Singularity. Far from a lucrative endeavor, this blog is about a passion for ideas and contributing to a discussion of the implications of exponential technology.

Over these past five years artificial intelligence has progressed rapidly, moving from a still far-off concept to real products that are affecting billions of people everyday at ever-increasing rates. Self driving cars have gone from prototypes to actual products and are on the cusp of leading to massive shifts in our economy and society.

Despite the accuracy of what we have been helping to predict, and the growth of our readership, this blog, remains a labour of love. We have seen many of our contemporaries move on, some to greater accomplishments, and many have faded away, to be part of the digital archive of things past.

Over the years we too have had periods where we were faced with the difficult choice of slogging on, or throwing in the towel. Could our energies be better spent in other activities? Our work? Our families? Other entrepreneurial pursuits? Reflecting back on the time spent on 33rd Square, was it, any of it, worth the effort?

For writers today, there are many sites that can provided help for writers like https://cheapessay.net/. But the impression left is that quantity is highly weighted over quality.  In the race to produce ever-increasing quantity of content, we too admittedly have sacrificed on the quality of our content, and our relevance overall.

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We could tell you that the real value of writing on a blog like this is all about the love of the task, or the attitude of service, or the confidence it builds in us, or the valuable lessons in writing and subject matter expertise formed, or  the discipline we have acquired as a result of the countless evenings and late nights of getting out the next day's stories.

We could tell you about the helpful and encouraging support the blog and the writers receive for our efforts.

Composing  fresh content on a small blog is often a desolate business. Part of the aim of the blog too at the outset was about generating a small income. At the time we started, blogging was still seen as a good way to generate additional income. For some, success has been well deserved, but for countless others of us out in the Internet, the lustre has faded and we are left having to evaluate the situation often. With ad blockers now widely used, and Google announcing they will soon build in their own into their browser, the revenue streams for small blogs appear to be drying up.

Over these years, it certainly has not been the financial rewards that have kept us going. The rewards have come in our work being quoted in scientific papers, in the college and university lecturers that have used our graphics and diagrams to train the next generation of scientists, engineers and technologists and in the readers who have contacted us thanking us for our getting the word out. 

When Neil deGrasse Tyson commented on one of our posts, we were thrilled.  When one of our stories goes viral we get thrilled. When Dennis Hong mentioned our site in the buildup to the DARPA robotics challenge we were thrilled. We are still going to strive to achieve these moments.

We are committed to continuing helping to spread the word about the promises and perils of the technological Singularity though, and we will find a way to make readers happy, foster and support discussion within the interested community and make 33rd Square better than ever before.

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