It’s not saying anything new to opine that 2009 is the year that personal blogs bought the farm. The SEO blogs and the “professional” blogs which have all the soul and character of matzo crackers couldn’t quite kill personal blogs, as hard as they tried. It took Facebook and Twitter to really deliver the death-wielding blow. For most of the past nine months, as I have spent time on those sites myself, I have argued that personal blogs did not have to die, that they could go back to being that wonderful little backwater of the Internet that they were when we all began blogging a decade ago. And I genuinely believe that they can, but the vast majority of personal blogs have to die before the survivors can begin again. Think of it, if you will, like MRSA — the bacteria who aren’t killed by the poison are the evolutionary winners and can exist even in a sea of antibiotics, er social networks.
Quite honestly, it’s probably just as well for all those other blogs to fade away while their authors drift through 140-character tweets, lame-brain crypto-profound status updates, quizzes, memes, and friend-list jockeying. Quite honestly, that’s exactly what all those blogs did in the first place, and little else. It’s better to corral up all that superficial noise on one big-ass website and let the people who have more to say, more to engage with, more to explore, go about their business with that much less noise to their signal. It is no great loss to have the “What I Had For Lunch” bloggers give up and relegate themselves to being “What I Had For Lunch” Facebookers. We can, and probably should, think about the ghettoization of so many people into one or two online holding pens in terms of the inevitable issue of corporate control of the web, but for the moment I am putting that thought on the backburner.
I reached a decision the other day that I, for one, would prefer to keep my soapbox and reinvest some effort and energy here instead of succumbing entirely to the half-digested regurgitation of the world that defines Facebook. I won’t flatter myself to even remotely suggest that my blog is anything more than some manifestation of the scattershot way my mind works, but over the last decade I have put an enormous amount of psychic energy into this form of self-expression, and I think it’s a better use of my time than trading snarky comments or taking one more asinine quiz. So I’m leaving it alone for a while — my intent is to stay off of Facebook for the next three months (Oct/Nov/Dec) — and getting back to basics right here, having sadly neglected this site for most of the last nine months.
Referring back to my topic statement — that personal blogs are dying like the flies in my kitchen — one of the really sad aspects of that is realizing that a lot of the people I’ve met online over the last decade have already given up the ghost on their blogs. They might post something now and again, but nothing of any substance, and not with any real momentum to keep them going. Some of these folks are self-aware enough to realize that they, too, have succumbed to the FaceBorg; I can see that others have lost their energy for blogging because their friends have all stopped (whether under the influence of social networking or not), and some have just lost interest organically (let’s face it, writing every day is not an easy task, and it’s not hard to run out of steam, especially in the long-term). Yesterday, I decided I was going to cull my RSS feeds, and as I went through the list I kept bumping into personal blogs that hadn’t popped up in my feeds for months and months; it was almost like waking up and realizing that everyone you know has died while you were asleep.
I ended up doing a savage cull of the feeds. In fact, I unsubscribed from 153 different feeds, leaving only 19 in place, one of which is just a tracking feed to see who is linking back to me and doesn’t really count. So of the 18 blogs left on my list, all of them are personal blogs. Of those, probably fewer than 5 are fairly active (one or more posts a week), another 3-4 were never prolific posters in the first place but can still be counted on to say something, and the remaining handful are sort of a “wish list” of people I keep hoping will have the same epiphany I had and will start writing again. Of the 153 that I dumped, most of them were topical sites related to my various interests, but personal blogs were well-represented in that list, I assure you.
A slight tangent — for all the good things about the availability of RSS feeds, I believe that they have also been a huge contributor to the fall of personal blogs. Part of the original experience was “visiting” your friends’ websites, getting ideas from them about designs, making comments, and being a part of those people’s online world. The text-only crawl of RSS makes it far too easy to just scan and not read posts, discourages commenting (because you usually have to “click-through” to do so), and removes the personal touches of seeing how someone chooses to present themselves on the web through their graphic design.
Back from that short digression, here’s what the deal is with me and this site: Some of you were good enough to respond to a feedback poll I did in the spring, and I have had a long time now to think about that feedback and what to do about it. Within the parameters (constraints?) of the way I have generally used this site, I agree with the sentiment that too many cut-and-dried linky posts are not good, but that is where this blog began and is not likely to go away, I just need to bring more to the party like a little analysis or synthesis of the material. Blowing away all those RSS feeds gives me a chance to discover some new things to read, and I will make the effort to stay away from the kind of site that has 130 posts a day, most of them hastily-rewritten press releases from the industries they follow. But the topics I am interested in are going to continue to be the main thrust — food, computer technology, the media industries, etc.
It’s my hope that I can get creative here once in a while, too, but I dare not promise anything. Every time I think my creative voice has returned, it seems to go so deep into hiding that it might never return. Back in the spring I got all excited about taking little weekly road trips, only to have The Black Dog come and crush that out of me so hard that I didn’t move out of my chair for three months. So we will proceed on little kitten feet in this regard.
This site has never been deeply confessional and never will be. I am pleased to share news and stories about my life, particularly through the lens of parenthood, but on the few occasions when I have let my guard slip and said more than was strictly necessary about things, I have always regretted it. I firmly believe in not hiding behind a manifestly artificial persona, and I have always included my full name in the name of the website itself, but I also recognize the importance of maintaining the separation between things suitable to share with the world and things best kept to oneself. It’s a pity that more people online don’t seem to understand and practice this.
Come the end of the year, I will re-evaluate all of this again. Maybe the FaceBorg are too strong to resist, maybe I, too, have finally run out of stuff to blog about, maybe something better (or worse) will have come along by then. For now, my soapbox and I are right here, back where we belong.
I was just going to ask when the road trips were going to start again, too. I have a fairly long mental list of places to send you. :D
Feel free to e-mail me your suggestions, Ailsa. The one basic premise was that any destination had to be within 60 miles of my house. Also, I’d rather go someplace that has several things to explore rather than a single destination. I can’t promise I’ll start doing them once a week as I originally intended, but I am glad to do them on occasion.
A blogging manifesto! Bravo!! I do Twitter and I must admit my attention to my blog has flagged a bit. But I am going back with more enthusiasm. Thanks for your post.
I, personally, found Twitter completely useless, but I do think that there are smart ways to use it. Letting it burden you all day long with the inane things 99% of Twitter users post is decidedly NOT smart. I think the trick with Twitter is to log into it only when you want to find out about something; treating it like some variation of IM wherein anyone can interrupt you at any time to say the most pointless and trivial thing, just doesn’t work.
Your blog is one of the ones I kept on my feed, Rhea. Get posting.
Sad to say, I’ve used the Facebook excuse to neglect my blog…not because I’m all that prolific a Facebook poster, but because it gives me the excuse to say to myself, “See? I wrote something. Now, leave me alone so I can watch TV or play a video game.”
I’m not saying that I’ll be able to fight the laziness monster successfully, but at least you’ve given me another reason to fight it out with the beast.
You are on my “wish list”, you wacky half-elf. I’ll be eyeballin’ you.