Monday, August 06, 2007
Focus on Blogging
I've never written a popular blog - not for me the mass readership of between 200 and 2000 a day. But recently I've been feeling like its peaked. I'm over the crest of the wave now and coming to a slow halt which will end with the faintest lap on the beach.
Blogging is fighting for internet time with a host of other newer interactions - all the myspacing, facebooking & second life-ing providing a different kind of interaction - immediate, networky, gamey. So more people are joining in with more activities spreading themselves ever more thinly and presumably favouring the instant gratification route.
Not since March have I got close to the heady 1700 per month readers (small fry to many, I know!) In the last 20 days only 2 have scatched over 50 readers. It didn't used to be like that. Maybe I've exhausted the subject. Maybe readers are loyal to the blogs they know well, too pressed for time to explore other blogs. It doesn't help that the old group of bloggers I followed when I started is diminishing monthly.
Perhaps the age of blogging is over. Perhaps the turning point was when mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon thereby pulling it into the limelight away from the individual and thrusting it into competition with magazines and journals and newspapers. Readers of mainstream media blogs probably don't investigate the lone voice out there in blogland - how would they know to trust us if they have no previous experience of the self-published? Its hard to turn away from what you know and trust to work at getting to know a different and individual voice. I suspect mainstream media is quite pleased about it. Its about control and winning circulation after all.
Someday, perhaps even soon, there will be nobody left for me to blog for and therefore no point in blogging. When I started it was exclusively for me but over time the audience has become extremely important. Blogs will exist (and do in their millions) like old dusty books in public libraries waiting for the day when they will be weeded because they haven't been borrowed in a decade.
9:24 PM
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