Can you believe this blog has been visited 15,000 times ? What on earth is so interesting about the words I write or the pictures I occasionally post? The worrying thing is that that the number would be far higher if I had kept my blog in one place (to give you some idea, my old PluggedOut blog used to generate over 1000 hits a day, before I gave it away and it was idiotically left to rot).
Over the last six or seven years, I have had my own blog script, a blogger blog, several wordpress blogs, a Yahoo 360 blog, a Livejournal blog, a MySpace blog, a Facebook blog, a Tumblr blog, a Posterous blog… it gets a bit silly really.
I decided earlier this year that enough was enough - that I should just put up with whatever tools are freely available and stop tinkering. People are interested in each other, right? Nobody really cares what the blog looks like, or which plumbing it has underneath. Hell - a lot of people only ever read in RSS readers anyway (at least, they do if they are me) - and only visit to post a comment.
I will still admit to cross posting to LiveJournal - but only because I have several friends over there. I’m considering putting that to an end soon too - most of them are defecting to WordPress (and “proper” blogs) anyway.
Late last year I read several news stories predicting the “end of blogging” and snorted somewhat derisively. Yes, there was a boom about 2 years ago, where general society caught wind of “blogging”, and yes - thousands of incredibly shallow “me too” people started writing online. Many of those same people were then dismayed to discover that nobody was interested in what they had to say, and wandered off.
They got it all wrong.
Writing in a blog is not about garnering attention, or a popularity contest. It’s about sharing a part of your life with the world. For many (me included) it’s about enjoying the act of writing - and of the selfless sharing of personal experience. When our thoughts or memories are commented upon, we have made a connection with somebody, somewhere, and should feel privileged.
The world is a lot smaller than it once was. Just this morning, somebody messaged me on Twitter, commenting that I invariably appear online at the same time they are logging off on an evening. It feels like carrying some kind of torch.