Oddverse.com

Just a plastic bag

Okay, this is actually it. Proper, final, goodbye to blogging.

I started blogging really early. I was writing my own content management system before I heard of blogger, and then I was an early adopter on that. I've been at it almost ten years - and some of it's been prolific, but mainly it's been kind of patchy. I've been wondering why.

When I first started blogging, most of my posts were really short. They were pretty much mainly links, and a little bit of commentary as to why I was linking, or which country I was in. I sometimes did interesting things, so I wrote longer pieces. I added sections to my site. I took them away. When commenting was the new thing, I added comments.

For a while, blogging became a social activity. Indeed, I've built some friendships through blogging with real people who I've met in real life. But I think there were a couple of major turning points.

Firstly, the mass proliferation of blogging devalued the blog. Odd thing to say, but at the point in time when there were only a few hundred blogs in the UK, it felt that there was something of a community. The proliferation of blogs led to them becoming little more than noise. Blogger had positioned itself as push-button publishing for the masses, and the masses adopted it. Good for them.

With the masses came spam. I disabled comments on this site a couple of months back, just because I was getting loads of spam and no comments. Tedious to maintain. Apart from anything else, most of the feedback I've been getting for a couple of years has been coming through The Twitter.

I was an early adopter on The Twitter. I gave it up pretty quickly thereafter. It was like Google+ is now - dull and underused. But it changed, and what it changed in to was more entertaining. Bizarrely, the mass appeal which had cheapened blogging had strengthened Twitter. I rejoined Twitter, and now it drives about 80% of the traffic to this site.

It's also more like what I was looking for in the first place. I feel like I was looking for a bicycle, but what was available was a motorbike - I got it, loved it, upgraded and upgraded and I'm left with a Harley Davidson. But I still just need a bike.

There are alternatives to blogging, and they're generally easier. I don't blog much these days, and if I do, it's long rambling pieces like this. Blogging is becoming more specialised as the twitternoise moves to The Twitter. There are some great blogs out there, but they're all about the content rather than the random musings that have characterised this site and its predecessors.

So this is it. This is how it ends. With a whimper. If you're looking for me, I'll be on The Twitter until that gets broken too.

@thequietscot