Under the heading of Tempus Fugit, I believe this is my 15th year blogging. When i started out it was on the page that used to learn HTML. There was no archiving. I moved posts around via copy and paste, completely reforming the page every time it got too big. It was hosted on my local internet provider, which still exists -- Provide.Net -- and still prominently dispalys its dial-up service. (Related: AOL still has over 2 million dial-up users.) Back then I tried to post a few interesting links and some brief comments everyday. Real base level blogging. It was what everyone was doing. We exchanged links and promoted each other's sites and posts. There was no Google; getting Yahoo's index was the big thing. I managed to get listed under Blogs section and alphabetically at the top of the list. That generated a good deal of traffic. I actually made connects with some prominent folks. But things changed quite rapidly. From a technical perspective everyone moved to hosted services. Blogger, pre-Google, was a big one, and is where I still am. Wordpress came along later and was more feature filled, which was important because as soon as everyone started blogging, everyone needed an edge or else you drifted into obscurity. Which is what I did.
There is very little amatuer blogging left. One or two prominent sites survived (Kottke). Other went corporate (Gawker being one service, albeit execrable). The well focused ones morphed into news sites (Ars Technica comes to mind). Most of the old blogs were whittled down to a small circle of readers and essentially functioned as a poorly designed versions of what would eventually be done better by contemporary social media.
So years ago I stopped blogging per se and just turned this site into a monthly diary. Though it's not really a diary in that I don't reveal my most intimate thoughts or anything that could be used against me or anybody else. I'm not the type to do that, which I count as a plus. I have very few regular readers. I get an occasional traffic blip if one of my posts gets linked up elsewhere, but for the most part this is just a document of my life and thoughts how I have spent my time. Is it of any value? To me it is. Sitting down at the end of every month to remember what I've done/read/watched/thought keeps me disciplined to write and I suspect it may provide some emotional comfort I my waning years. It gives me an outlet for my thoughts and opinions without having to worry about being shouted down or interrupted -- people tend to give the written word more thought than the spoken word -- at least the few people left who read do. But mostly, I've learned that if you are moved to do something and you have the opportunity, you shouldn't spend time questioning your motives. Often the experience itself reveals your motives in time.
So I continue.
