Personal blogs vs. Everything else
A quick scan of this blog’s front page shows 10 posts, the oldest one written over six months ago. That’s a mere 10 posts in a six month time period. Pathetic.
I am not going to make excuses as to why this blog has dried up. Most of all, I need to make a concerted effort to post more. I know this.
But there are a few really good reasons for the stale content. I suspect that many bloggers are struggling with this same issue, so I’ll quickly share my thoughts.
The lack of blog posts has no correlation to the amount of time spent online. If anything, I find myself online now more than ever, sometimes as much as 12 hours a day.
Instead, I think it’s a question of purpose/function. A few years ago, this blog (like most personal blogs) served a variety of disconnected purposes:
- sharing links to new and/or interesting websites
- sharing editorial, opinionated content
- functioning as a “personal journal” where I’d share information about what I was doing
- a place to share photos or multimedia
I still do all of these things, but through more specialized online services. I bookmark and share links on del.icio.us, I tell the world what I’m doing with twitter, and I use flickr to post and share photos. Those are just a few of the many online services I use on a near-daily basis, instead of this blog.
And the issue is further complicated by things like tumblelogs, vlogs, moblogs, etc.
So the question is: In a sea of decentralized online services, what should the long-term purpose of a “personal blog” be?
- Does it end up being a catch-all for anything that doesn’t already have a home elsewhere?
- Should it function as a “portal,” aggregating other services?
- Could it be a place for editorial content and longer “essays” (instead of the sometimes typical 1-2 paragraph blog post)?
- Most importantly, what’ll happen to the future of blogs as specialized online services are introduced?
I should point out that I’m not talking about blogs focused on a specific subject (such as engadget opr Joystiq. I’m specifically talking about “personal” blogs that sometimes lack focus.
Personally, I’m tempted to back and delete all the old blog posts that are not longer editorial content, and turn this site into a holding place for longer writings.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to use the various online services to connect and communicate with people via the web. Follow me at twitter or del.icio.us. Leave a comment if you have thoughts on this.
4 Comments
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It’s tough to negotiate what a personal blog is with all of these specific tools coming out. I’m in a similar dilemma with Mallinson.us vs. em.tumblr.com. We talked about this yesterday and you see Tumblelogs as more more Twitter+… I see them more as Blog+. Reason being that Tumblr “just works”. It’s easier to post something, so it’s more moment to moment, there’s little admin involved, and there’s simply just less going on when posting (tags, categories, allow or disallow comments, etc). It’s refreshing to not have to think about all that stuff, even at the cost of comments and other features.
Funny you should comment on this. I was just thinking how I miss your more frequent blog posts.
I do see what you’re saying. But I look to personal blogs not just to learn about a link, or an event or to find a photo. I like the explanations, opinions and comments, both from the blogger and from readers that go along with blog posts. There’s more exposition on these sites than on, say, Flickr or Upcoming. I suppose one can comment and have discussions on these other sites as well, but I find that people tend to do so less often than on personal blogs.
At the very least, a personal blog can serve as a central hub for all the other more specialized sites.
My Flights of Fancy picked up the conversation over here with some additional thoughts…
I have another approach to these things, esp between a Tumblelog vs a blog. For me it’s Consumption vs Creation. With a Tumblelog it’s about what I’m taking in, where I see blogs as places where I’ve digested a few different things and offer something back. I’ve made that distinction before, my blog used to be split between “consume categories” and “create categories”… it’s tool agnostic.