OK, I have no idea what to do with this blog anymore. No sense of focus or audience or anything.
The people I know read this include former colleagues, old friends, family, people I’ve met through the blogosphere, people I know through the internet in other contexts… Few to no common threads.
Posting seems fragmented since I’ve stopped ranting about politics. (By the way, this is not an act of willpower. I no longer want to rant about politics. I am finding better things to do than look at the world in terms of good guys and bad guys, no matter how good earnestly the folks currently in power seem to be auditioning for the role of “bad guys.”)
(I tried once to stop ranting through willpower, and it didn’t work. Nothing I’ve ever tried to do through willpower has ever worked, as far as I can tell. It is a pretty fair bet, at least for me, that if I think I just need more willpower to accomplish something, it can not be accomplished, at least by the means I’m trying to accomplish it. I seem to operate pretty much on maximum willpower at all times [modest as that may be] with no reserves to pull out for an emergency.)
Anyway, the audience for this blog — at least in terms of the people whom I know read it — is so damn disparate that I have a hard time writing anything to it. There’s no longer that much I have to say to “the blogosphere.”
So I just use it as a link dump. It’s sort of a really overengineered del.icio.us feed, with occasional sentences or two of opinion or personal remarks, but nothing that I wouldn’t mind sharing with all those readers who have very little to do with each other.
I’m honestly getting tired of it.
Don’t know what I’m going to do about it yet. Stewing.
[update: reposting because there was something deeply wack about this post, it produced a double entry with double comments boxes on the comments page, only the second of which worked. What up wordpress??]
ah, looks like things are back to normal in the comments section…
I think you may have pissed wordpress off by the post.
What are you doing Dave?
Though I know you didn’t ask for advice, I find it hard not to dispense advice at the moment.
Personally I find that I’m writing to a similar group (in many cases the same group) as you. I’ve pretty much given up worrying about the audience. To my mind, the purpose of the thing is to allow me to write on topics I care about. As such, I just write and assume that something a reader cares about will appear eventually.
A great example of this would be the daily pictures of my bathroom renovations. It’s a safe guess that pretty much none of my regular readers cared about that.
All kidding aside, I really enjoy hearing what you have to say on a wide variety of topics. I’ve enjoyed your posts on this blog, as well as those over at Esoteric Murmurs.
My advice: post what you want, whether links augmented by a few comments or something more substantial, it’s all good.
Personally, I’d like to hear more about your family.
Ever since I got the story wrong from you on new information from old scrolls, I thought you should shut this place down!!!
…..
Writing just to write is a good thing. Honestly, I was always under the impression that you enjoyed doing this. That is its own reward. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.
Perhaps if you quit, it will liven up list traffic. :)
What DAG said.
Don’t let someone else’s perceived ennui orchestrate yours. But if it doesn’t blow your hair back, hey. Give it up.
But it *would* be cool to hear more about your family.
I would keep blogging, or writing, or something, somehow, somewhere.
Just not here.
What DAG said. Except that TheList will eventually borg your blog, so there is no reason to change venue.
There ain’t much late-breaking timeliness to what you post (not a bad thing, for sure, since anything worth reading from yesterday is not, by definition, etc…) which means, I think, you could play with time. You can edit, continue, change your mind, and reference yourself (your old blog posts) or perhaps that is to say you could wikipedia yourself. The Disparateness is not as disparate as you think, I think. One owes it to someone to do the work of rehashing, if only to discover the worth of fine-grained digital navel-images, or not, for yourself and for your readership. I did not intend to confuse this comment with … an incoherent thing. To Wit: I hope you don’t stop blogging.
I read it for the weird links to stuff I wouldn’t’ve found otherwise, and just to hear you go off about strange things, dude. :D
Hi Ed. Yours is the blog I read most regularly. Your mix of technical reviews, reading notes, personal info and the occasional political rant is great. If you don’t enjoy it, what would you enjoy writing about? That might be interesting too.
verily, there is more to life than blogging. i stopped a while ago after a year, of regular posting, but that was so i could concentrate on some personal ish w/o feeling obligated to anything. near the end, mine became something like a pumped up link-log too, with the occasional outburst.
but a little while before i stopped, it occurred to me that blogging’s kinda like the music business. well, in that most musicians (or any artist for that matter) really only have so much to say. some are one-hit/note wonders. the talented ones can crank out mebbe two decent albums. the rare geniuses like stevie wonder and the beatles can pump out multiple platinum albums over a long period of time.
but, let’s face it, most of us, by definition are NOT geniuses. there’s only so much to say before you start repeating yourself and that, the repetition, gets old. and tired. and exhausting.
blogging will always be around i suppose cuz there’s always a new generation to come of age and find voice. if you’re going to stick with it, blog as a form of creative expression. your audience will develop organically on its own.