Viewport

Monday, August 09, 2010

The six-year itch

August 4th was my sixth year anniversary of blogging. My very first blog post title was, "No, I'm not a rabid Elvis fan" in which I tried to deny any obsession with Elvis despite the fact my blog was called Dizgraceland and I called myself Tim-Elvis. Me thinks the blogger doth protest too much.

After six years, my blog is still called Dizgraceland, but my Web name is no longer Tim-Elvis. For awhile, I called myself Tim-Id. Finally, I just changed it to Time.

I used to pride myself for my blog longevity. Near as I can tell, most people stop blogging after a couple of weeks. A few die hards stick with it for a few months. Some even make it past a year. I don't know of anyone who has blogged for six years. I think I am truly a Methuselah in the blog world now.

My blog has never really had much of a following. I used to think it was just a matter of time before I got discovered and would be an Internet celebrity. After six years, I can safely say that isn't going to happen. I am sure there are many reasons why very few people read my blog. For one, I read very few other people's blogs. Oh, I used read some regularly. But most suffered the malady that infects almost all bloggers. Blogging regularly is a major time and energy suck. It can also be an emotional roller coaster. So most of the bloggers I read have long since stopped blogging. Their blogs remain like an abandoned gas station that went belly up when they moved the Interstate.  

Back to why people don't read my blog. Since I started blogging to basically indulge my frustrated muse, I don't really write the type of stuff that most people give a rip about. It is probably why I could never get any of my fiction published. And there is this niggling little realization I've come to as I've aged along with my blog. I'm really not as good as a writer as I think I am. Or thought I was. The beauty of a blog, though is that it doesn't matter. No one pays me to write this so it doesn't have to be good.

I kind of blame social media for chipping away at the fabric of the blog world, too. With Twitter and Facebook sucking people's attention spans away, very few people have the patience to read or write a blog anymore. It's a pity. When I used to have people who would read my blog and comment, it was kind of like a social book club where people would share their views on the topic. A blog used to be like a cracker barrel you could sit around telling jokes while you whittled on a stick.

Not that I have ever sat around a cracker barrel. I'm old, but not that old.

The other hard thing about blogging for any length of time, especially as you age, is writing something new. I can't tell you how many times I've started writing a blog post thinking I've come up with a gem of a new topic only to discover that the reason it was flowing so easily and familiar like was because I'd written about it a couple of years ago. Sometimes I've found I've written the same blog post two or three times. Perhaps this is more a flaw in my aging mind than a pitfall of blogging.

If I have had any regrets after six years of blogging, its just that I can't be as open and honest in a personal blog like I naively thought I could be when I started blogging. There are now whole industries out there that mine the Internet for bits and pieces of personal information. And what you used to think was harmless to share with the world can be used in amazingly devious ways. It is a stalker's paradise.

Anyway, despite the boredom, burnout, fear of stalkers and lack of inspiration, I keep blogging. Perhaps I'll get a t-shirt that says, "Keep on bloggin' " kind of like those "Keep on Truckin' " shirts from the 70s. 


Or have I already done that? I'd better search my blog archives.

2 comments:

Benignjamin said...

Here I am commenting on an archived post. It's kind of like time traveling. Or....trolley trippn' three lefts to Tralfamadore
With Prof. Quint'ini.s Almanac on a chrono synclastic infundibulum.

Out
BenignJamin

Time said...

Dude, are you sure you aren't Mickey? You should write a blog. You've got his way of turning a phrase!