death of blogs?

I see that Jane Brocket, at Yarnstorm, is apparently giving up blogging (or at least taking an extended break). Sad, because her blog was one I really enjoyed.

I guess blogs have been fading these past years. Facebook put some out to pasture - I suppose Facebook is more immediate, and shorter-format, and seems more visual. I just never got into Facebook because the people I knew on it mainly used it as a way of sharing family news and kid pictures and stuff like that, sort of a virtual "brag book," and I don't really have any of that going on in my life (Outside of the constant internal monologue in my head, my life is really pretty boring). Also Facebook is less pseudonymous (nothing online is actually really anonymous) than blogging. and I like the fact that students are less likely to find (or to recognize) me here.

(I did sign up for Facebook, mainly so I could monitor the town's "disaster preparedness" page to find out when a boil order was lifted. Yup, they hid that kind of information behind a loginwall on their Facebook page. I suppose I should be happy that the boil order's start was actually officially announced, but seeing as the town has a reverse-911 system they use for stuff like notifying us of holidays when trash is not being picked up, you'd think they could use that for the "boil order is now lifted" notification...)

I started blogging back in 2002, at the height of knitting blogs. It was an exciting time. Even "big" bloggers were still small enough that they would respond to your comments or even comment on your blog. Eventually, for a few, they got so big (in terms of readership or things like publishing deals) that they didn't seem as personal. It was like there were knitblogging celebrities and then everyone else was hoi polloi. (I suppose that's the way with everything).

Even before Facebook became the behemoth it is, some people gave up blogging. Some, I suppose, got bored with it. Some had changes in their lives, babies being a big one. And I will admit, shamefully, a tiny bit of frustration when what had been a knitting blog morphed into an all-baby-pictures, nothing-but-pictures-no-writing, all-the-time blog. And there were a few I gave up on because of the focus changing. (Probably I've lost readers as my focus has shifted from "mostly knitting" to "talking about knitting mainly when I finish something or have some specific insight, but also a lot of talking about reading and work stuff"). I suppose some people quit upon changing careers; I have heard of work places having very limiting policies on what you can do in terms of "social media." And really, if someone starts writing for their bread and butter, I can see blogging going by the wayside: you're not going to give away free slices of bread if you're trying to keep a bakery in business. (Well, Great Harvest Bread Company does, but the metaphor still works)

And then Ravelry. A lot of people shifted over to curating their projects and project discussion there instead. And I will say for free pattern giveaways, making them available on Ravelry (where you can "store" them in your "library") is a pretty cool functionality. But still, there are people not on Ravelry...

And I think Twitter maybe drew some people away. And Tumblr, though that seems to be an almost-purely visual medium. I have to admit I still prefer having a longer-format platform where I can write out what I want without having to resort to ampersands or annoying abbreviations like "ppl" for "people" in order to get my point across. (Also, sometimes I wonder if Tumblr is actually just eight or 10 blogs with original content, and all the other Tumblrs are just endlessly linked resharing of that content). And the short-form stuff often leads to stuff like soundbites, and soundbites about complex situations...well, I think of the old Mencken quotation. And there are some people, on some of the platforms, who get so OUTRAGED about stuff so easily. (Yeah, yeah, I know blogs do too. But it's different, somehow. A shouty blog is kind of like a newspaper on a newsstand you don't have to read. A shouty poster on a social site....it's like going to a coffeehouse to talk to friends and there's that one guy over in the corner screaming about fluoridated water.)

(And yeah, sometimes I express frustration on Twitter, but it's less commonly geopolitical and more commonly  something like "Why can't the stupid textbook website make it easy for profs to access content?")

Some people do still blog but write less frequently. That seems a reasonable compromise and if my life truly got so complex I didn't have time (or didn't feel like I could make time) to write once or twice a day, that's what I would do. But I admit I wait and long for the infrequent bloggers to post something. And I'm enough of a worrier that when someone alludes to health or family problems, and then doesn't blog for six months....well, I do worry.

I miss knitblogs. I think of some of the ones I used to link to, who now no longer blog or who only blog maybe once a month. And yeah, I get that it's kind of complaining that the free ice cream machine isn't more liberal with its largesse. But a lot of the bloggers I read had really interesting lives and it was fun to read about their projects or their travels or their gardens or whatever.

Sometimes I wonder (And okay, sometimes I fantasize about) being able to claim the title of "Last Knitblogger Standing" by still writing a blog while all the others have either gone over to Facebook or given up blogging or whatever. Perhaps not a desirable title, and probably being the Last Knitblogger Standing means you don't get many readers who are knitters (and fewer commenters). But, I don't know. I like the blog format. Maybe that makes me a Luddite. Maybe the way to get pageviews is to do something else. Though thank goodness, I've never been tempted by the drumbeat of "monetization" like some have. (In the most recent issue of Grit, a farmblogger was talking about "monetizing" his blog as a way of majorly supplementing income, and I thought "Good luck with that" because from what I've heard from people who use things like the advertising add-ons, the amount of income you make is truly minimal). I suppose if anything, the blogging, few comments, some days of few readers, have helped me get past my envy of the "popular" knitbloggers and be more content with doing my own thing even if people don't read me that much or comment that much. Because sometimes stuff happens to the popular knitbloggers (getting trolls, fights starting in the comments) that I prefer not to deal with. Or they become uncomfortably public. As much as I fantasize about it being nice to walk into a bookstore and have an audience waiting to hear me speak and cheering for me (like Yarn Harlot gets, for example), I also know I'm enough of an introvert uncomfortable in the spotlight that I'd come to hate it after a while.

But I admit, especially after a long day of meetings at work or a "bad connection" day of teaching or a day of getting a manuscript or grant proposal rejected, the grass still does look a wee bit greener on that side of the fence, and it would be kind of nice to have legions of adoring fans. (How many is a legion? One of the online history cites suggests a full-strength Roman legion was 6000. So "legions" of fans would be a lot indeed.) And yeah, I suppose I have fans, just not as many or as vocal as some have.