Something I've been wondering about, and something that I see both Bess and Catherine have brought up recently:

Are people reading knitting blogs (and other blogs, for that matter) less?
Are they just bored with it?
Is it because it's summer?
Is there some new obsession that's taking the place of blogs?

I've heard about - and gone and visited - the Ravelry site. I've decided - with a bit of a heavy heart - that it's just not for me. It seems - from my fairly cursory looking - to be mostly devoted to people uploading lovely photos of their stuff, their stash, patterns they've written.

Like a lot of the "cool kids" things (despite what Ravelry claims, I do think it's going to turn out to be a bit about the "cool kids"), I have a feeling that:

a. I might not fit in there
b. I really don't have the time/skills to devote to doing it up right.

Like the photos - I am not that good of a photographer. I don't own a whitebox or whatever they call those things where you can put a sock in, and photograph it, and have no Distracting Background Objects. Most of the stuff I photograph is either taken on the seat of one of my two overstuffed chairs, or my wood floor, or my coffee table. Many of my shots are poorly lit because I live in a home, not a photography studio.

I also despair over the thought of photographing and posting part or all of my stash. That takes time. Time I could be knitting. Time I could be quilting.

I'm not a fiber professional. I'm a fiber-enthusiast-who-fits-it-in-when-she-can.

I'm also not big at taking "every stage along the way" photos, or doing tutorial type things. (I'd love to do it, but you know? When I start working on something, I want to WORK on it, not figure out "How will I teach someone to make this in a distributed-learning type setting?" Because I teach to earn my daily bread. And I've firmly resisted, up to now, the whole "distributed learning" mess where you teach online.) I'm not opposed to giving a pattern or to showing a few in-progress shots, but I doubt I'd ever sit down and take the time to photograph something every step of the way and write up how I'm doing it.

I do see that Ravelry's a way to direct people to your blog, and that's nice - I wonder if perhaps the Ravelry folks are seeing an uptick in blog traffic at the expense of other bloggers.

(My Internal Critic is jumping up and down and waving her hands. So I must let her have her say. And what she is saying, in that oh-so-snarky Internal Critic voice is, "Maybe YOUR blog is just boring and that's why people don't read it."

That said, I'll box her back up and try to shove her back in the corner for the rest of the week.)

I don't know. I said for a long time that I didn't care so much about readers and comments and that kind of thing, that I was blogging mainly for ME, as a way of keeping sort of a journal about my life and my projects.

But you know what? Even though I claim to be a "loner" and "don't need other people" I do find myself getting pretty lonesome the middle of these summer Saturday afternoons (when I've been by myself, mostly, since Thursday noon). And just as I claim not to care what other people think (but secretly, deep down, really do, very much so), I also find that the comments and e-mails and the thought that people ARE reading this (even when I'm boring) that kind of buoys me up and keeps me going. Especially on those long summer weekends when I'm by myself, or those afternoons when I'm in the office, trying to slog away on a paper.

Incidentally, another reason I probably won't join Ravelry is that it's just so huge - it looks like it would take quite a while to learn and explore - there's all these sections, and when I look at all the inventories and queues and lists of popular patterns and such, I kind of despair at having enough time to master it all. (Internal Critic again: "Oh, so now you're all, 'it looks hard so I'm not going to try?'" No, that is not it, that is not it at all).

Again - my free time, even in the summer I'm finding, is rare. And my energy, for some reason, has become kind of scarce. I have to jealously husband what energy I have to work...and I think that energy's better spent for me working on socks or quilts than playing with some shiny new cyber-service.

So I don't know. Maybe just as "video killed the radio star," Ravelry will kill the blogging star.

(Not that I was ever a "star," mind you - Internal Critic yet again - but you get what I mean).