Wednesday, April 25, 2012

For the Love of Blogging

Is it a dying phenomenon?  This blogging.

Borrowed from a blog who borrowed it from someone else's blog is this:
Mostly blogs ebb and flow with the life rhythms of their creator. Graduate students with blogs get deep into their dissertations, or finish a dissertation, and decide to put aside a blog. Babies arrive, or people get seriously ill. Work makes new demands, and takes energies away from a blog.
However, I think there’s also something about the form itself that poses a problem, and that the problem has gotten more acute as blogging has evolved as a practice. A self-aware blog writer eventually starts to recognize static or repetitive patterns in their posting that threaten to devolve into schtick. Readers may not object: in fact, the larger and more stable a community of readers a blogger has, the more they may in fact come to rely on the blogger to merely convene or spark a rolling conversation among commenters, to be the rhetorical equivalent of comfort food.
After more research, I learned that 11% of blogs die after one year.  Those who remain open may fizzle, but surprisingly, most remain alive, changing and evolving with time.

Interesting.

And I'm still stuck on the concept of blogging "comfort food".  Like blogging that makes you fat?  Ha ha.

It's true that there isn't always this amazing something to share.  Or life is just too personal to put it out there for the whole world to see.

Or we just run out of something new to say.

Or we're sure you're falling asleep hearing the only thing we can think of to say.

Unlike books, life isn't always suspenseful, exciting and living on the edge.  But what we read should be.  That's why we read.  Even blogs.  We like to know what goes on in other people's heads.  Their genius and their idiosyncrasies.  We like good news, sometimes bad news, and we love to learn something new.  

I recently read a blog about trying to lose weight followed up by some good old fast food.  And I laughed.  Mostly because it was real.  Then I looked at pictures on a blog showing us her monthly weight loss- and it was inspiring, because it was real.

I sound like I'm obsessed with weight.  Actually, I am researching another book idea.  Fiction, of course.  Which I have no business doing because I'm in middle of writing something else, and I really should edit another manuscript before I even think about writing another book.

But it's still interesting to me.  

What's your thoughts on the blogging world?

3 comments:

Sara said...

I used to blog quite frequently. I like to pictures on my blog and I got frustrated with how much effort it took just to put the picture on. I would write out my blog first and then put the pictures on and things would get out of order and I would get so annoyed with how much time that I took that eventually I just stopped writing my blog. I do love to read blogs though and recipe blogs in particular are totally "comfort food" to me!

Anonymous said...

I think that when it comes to blogging, you should blog only if you enjoy it--regardless of the topic. If you don't feel the love for it, it shows. I had to "evolve" that way and I'm much happier having decided that I didn't want my blog to be solely about my writing. I know other people who LOVE their blogs being solely about their writing and I'm totally okay with that. It's all about what you want and what you can manage.

Laura said...

I think my blog is solely random. I just write whatever I feel like writing. And it's weird- I think I got the most hits when I posted about the squirrels in my ceiling. I mean, that was like serious news. But my blog is sort of like my old friend. Anything goes.