Yes, I have a blog. Other people have blogs too - or do they?
I was waiting for someone to answer a query yesterday and found I had also left my blog cover page open as well. I went to tidy it away from the screen when I looked at it again and realised that there were bloggers on the list I "follow" who simply do not seem to blog any more.
Some of them have not blogged for years. Why do I still have them there? Why did they stop writing? Will they start writing again one day?
I must have once enjoyed what these people wrote. I prowled back through some of them. Yes, I did. There were people who were funny. There were people who were sad. There were people who were serious. There were people who clearly thought they should try blogging but gave up fairly quickly. I tried encouraging one of the last by "following" but even purrs of approval in the comments were not sufficient.
There are regular bloggers. They may not write every day but they write often enough for me to feel that yes, they are still there. Some write every few days, others write weekly or monthly. One or two just put something up every few months but it is still often enough to feel that they will put up another post.
And then there are those sad places that are dusty and neglected. Their owners have not touched them in three or even four years. I wonder about these abandoned places. They remind me of abandoned houses slowly crumbling away, not even inhabited by mice or spiders. I wonder what the occasional visitors (there must be some) make of them? Do they see ghosts?
Is there a place where lonely, unvisited blog pages gather for company or do they just go to sleep?
The internet is crowded with the past. Is there any room for the future? Yes, there must be. There are a few people who keep telling me to write my blog. That's nice of them. I made a pact with myself when I started that it had to be a long term affair. I couldn't just start and then abandon the idea. It's a daily writing exercise but, unless someone comments, I have no idea whether people are reading it.
Is that what went wrong for other people? Was it lack of feedback, comment and conversation that caused them to halt?
I wonder about the past. I wonder about all those blog posts nobody reads and all those blogs that have been abandoned. Have they been forgotten?
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6 comments:
There are many reasons why someone might stop blogging: the time it takes, a lack of comments, negative comments, over-exposure, ... So far, blogging has been good to me, which is why I'm still a "regular blogger."
When I was at primary school all those years ago, every day started with "News". We had a plain paper exercise book and had to rule a number of lines and fill them with words - what I had for tea yesterday, games played, what the weather was like (significant since this was West Cornwall, and the storms came in straight off the Atlantic). When we had written enough to satisfy Miss, we could draw a picture of it, and colour it with our eight wax crayons.
I reckon a blog is just like that for the folk like me who just want to think aloud, and show off a bit - electronic photography produces much better pictures than my pencil ever could althogh it doesn't have the nostalgic smell of those wax crayons!
What is more, Miss is not around to put a red cross through my mis-spellings!
Ooh, that pricked my conscience! I have a half-written blog post that's still sitting waiting for me to do a bit of research to check some historical facts that are necessary to accompany the photos I took. Maybe I should actually do it!!!
I go back to some neglected blogs on my list from time to time...I enjoyed their writing, or their viewpoint and am sorry not to see them updated.
I'm guilty too..I have one blog about travels in France that I have not touched for ages - mostly, I think, because I have been too busy getting out of France!
Once that's settled, I'll be back to it.
I blog from time to time...not daily as I have an unpredictable schedule at home....when something occurs to me to say.
I do hope you continue with this blog as I learn and take a lot from it.
Perhaps some of them are like me. I have four public blogs and one private one. It is true, they don't receive consistently the same attention. I can't do anything about that, but I prefer to have them split up, so that people interested in one sort of topic aren't bored to death by another.
For example, one of my blogs is my bridge blog. There just isn't any point putting anything on it about other things except occasionally the very closely related. Equally, nobody is going to want to read 'He held xyz and the auction went' unless a bridge player.
So I have: a bridge blog (generally neglected right now), a blog for our book business (very inconsistently updated) a book review blog, a knitting and cooking and occasionally bits of life in other ways blog, the last two of which are vigorously updated at the moment. My private blog is keeping track of a book writing project, so you can imagine, more writing there.
It is very strange the way things on the internet don't die. Most poignantly, there is the blog of Kathreen Ricketson, one day posting about how lucky her family was to be camped out on a WA beach having the most wonderful time and the next day - not recorded on her blog of course - dead, along with her husband, in front of her children, in the same beautiful spot.
The internet is a very strange place.
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