Friday, September 30, 2011

RIP blogs: lapsed blogger's last post

Interesting article, to me, at least. And it only uses the dreaded word "blogosphere" once. I loath that word. A link and a couple excerpts and then a few thoughts of my own...


As someone who has been writing blogs for well over ten years now (off and on), I've written a few of those farewell posts myself. Hell, this blog has even seen one, maybe two, in its day.

Sometimes they are written when I've tried a new platform and it just didn't fit into my scheme of things (MySpace blog). Rubble got one when I re-purposed my blog, and maybe one back when I started posting the bulk of my personal posts over on Live Journal (which now is due for a farewell post of its own).

For me, though, I agree with the fellow who sees social media as being an "outpost" for the blog's "home base." My hit counts have gone through the roof since I figured out some good strategies for making the social media sites and the blog sites play well together, utilizing the strengths of each.

Bottom line, though, blogging is not for everyone while social media is. I am a professional writer, so I enjoy the longer format of the blog. Also, I don't care too much about how many people are reading my blog.

I only have statistics available for Rubble and Democracy in Distress since May 2009 and both were pretty much dormant for years until March 2011, but I know that, for years, a big month for these sites would be around two dozen hits. Over the last couple months, I've seen the traffic growing exponentially on these sites, since I've revived them, and that is nice, but it is not why I write them.

For me, they are just my journals and a place to vent. A place to share with a few close friends and family members. Long before the "invention" of the internet, I was writing the same sorts of entries in notebooks and journals.

What I like about doing it on-line, instead of in a notebook, is that I can go back and re-read old entries when I want to, and I don't have to dig through dusty boxes of old notebooks looking for that one from eight years ago... The one I was using that one summer.... I think it was blue... Or, was it... Ah, it was seven years ago and it was in that box of stuff that got left behind in that move. Damn.

Of course, it is nice having other people appreciate my blogs, as well. It is gratifying to look at the stats and see that I had 97 hits on Democracy In Distress yesterday, so some other people found the same topics interesting as I have recently. It is gratifying to see that this blog had 1506 page views in September, so far.

But if it was all about the page counts, then I would have quit a long time ago. This blog has been in existence for over ten years, and I know that in March I had as many page views as I had for the entire ten years before then.

So, considering this, I really do not feel that blogs are going to die, but I think we are seeing a weeding process. People who are not really into it for the right reasons are fading away to other platforms more suited to how they want to communicate with their friends, new platforms that did not exist until the last few years.

Before that, blogs were one of the more effective ways to communicate and to stay in touch with people. But not any more. Now they are returning to the hands of the writers, commentators, and artists who made them popular in the first place.

And I think the... ack, I conceed... the "blogosphere" will be stronger because of this. Let's face it, I may be interested in the quality of the omelet from that restaurant where you had breakfast, but I really don't want to spend more than 140 characters worth of my time on it. And I definitely do not want to take the time to click away from the page I am on to read it.

However, for the omelet's recipe, or for a well thought out review of the restaurant serving it, or for a really nice photo of the food or the restaurant's architecture, then I will click that link. I will want to take that time, and I will keep visiting your blog for as long as you feel like posting.



'via Blog this'

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