Musings on communication tools and how to best use them

What is the best way of sharing my geneaolgy progress and questions with friends and family with a minimum effort? Quite frankly it could apply to any subject area.

What are my journaling goals? How much do these overlap? Apparently I still don't know.

Facebook is a broadcast media that reaches a wide number of people  that may be interested. One of the the things I have enjoyed is responses from people I would not have thought to email. Unfortunately Facebook seems best for short posts that do not need to be found again. Also I don't know anybody that understands which posts a user sees. Additionally most of us users are looking to improve the signal to noise ratio of what we read. One of the ways I attempt do this for my audience is put information in comments under previous posts. This balance  always seems uncertain. Facebook seems better suited for raising awareness with a link,  than the actual content. 

Blogger seemed to better fit longer narration and using tags to find things later. If I understand correctly *anybody* can read and navigate them. I assume you need to be logged in with google to comment.(or I can try to remember if you responded by email (my favorite), text (possibly fastest), or facebook). My assumptions have been drawn into question.

I had not really considered my blogging efforts in the sense of a published media and trying to attract followers. Some of the resources I may want to consider going forward include

• my competitors - https://www.cyndislist.com/blogs/
• advice for content creators - https://support.google.com/blogger/thread/84172078

This is a rather ironic choice, since whatever structures I have had for following other people's blogs,  have failed the test of time. Feedly is installed on my phone. I had to reset my password. It is not yet configured with my friends' blogs. :(  (have added one since starting to write this.)

As I write this a couple of things become obvious:

• I am sitting at my computer typing in Notepad so that I can copy and paste to blogger and then twiddle the format. I do this to avoid accidental loss of data while typing.
• I only really considered  a subset of tools I have already used.

I use googlegroups for new mailing lists. That would have privacy, but would require me to administer a list of emails. I think I would lose the ability to share with just a URL. I think I would also lose parts of my desired audience.

(how do we get away from facebook? or google?) 

I invite you to share other usages and suggest tools. And your blogs!