cue the crickets
So Matt Langley posted earlier this month that he will be relocating to Brooklyn sometime in September or thereabouts--and at that point presumably will become a NYC-centric arts blogger.
Now J.T. Kirkland announces that after a five year run, he's thinking about not writing Thinking About Art anymore.
The herd (such as it is) appears to be thinning.
I've talked to a number of other D.C. bloggers over the summer about the problems of keeping up with their respective blogs--particularly when it seems like the platform is eroding or fragmenting anyway, branching into a number of related outlets for the same sort of activity. See Twitter; see Facebook.
And then there's the example of Jerry Saltz, who seems perfectly content to continue to post his electronic musings/campaigning on Facebook, and has said point blank that he doesn't want a blog. Some have argued that he's clearly on the wrong platform--he can't monetize his writing on Facebook; is struggling with an interface not meant to do what he wants it to do; is merely afraid of having to take his electronic side project too seriously, etc., etc.
For me, an admittedly part-time blogger with no real designs for monetizing what I do here, the desire to use Facebook actually makes sense. My blog posts automatically appear in my FB feed, and at this point I tend to get more comments from D.C. folks there than here. (Which makes me wonder sometimes if I should discontinue the practice--is it hurting my stats? Do I have stats?)
That said, I'm still charmed by the way my blog automatically archives whatever I do. I also like having a roster of blogs that I actually read over in my sidebar. And I enjoy the feeling (even if it's a bit illusory) that I'm stitching my voice into a buzzing, jostling web of other viewpoints, all aggregating and interlacing in similar ways.
Now J.T. Kirkland announces that after a five year run, he's thinking about not writing Thinking About Art anymore.
The herd (such as it is) appears to be thinning.
I've talked to a number of other D.C. bloggers over the summer about the problems of keeping up with their respective blogs--particularly when it seems like the platform is eroding or fragmenting anyway, branching into a number of related outlets for the same sort of activity. See Twitter; see Facebook.
And then there's the example of Jerry Saltz, who seems perfectly content to continue to post his electronic musings/campaigning on Facebook, and has said point blank that he doesn't want a blog. Some have argued that he's clearly on the wrong platform--he can't monetize his writing on Facebook; is struggling with an interface not meant to do what he wants it to do; is merely afraid of having to take his electronic side project too seriously, etc., etc.
For me, an admittedly part-time blogger with no real designs for monetizing what I do here, the desire to use Facebook actually makes sense. My blog posts automatically appear in my FB feed, and at this point I tend to get more comments from D.C. folks there than here. (Which makes me wonder sometimes if I should discontinue the practice--is it hurting my stats? Do I have stats?)
That said, I'm still charmed by the way my blog automatically archives whatever I do. I also like having a roster of blogs that I actually read over in my sidebar. And I enjoy the feeling (even if it's a bit illusory) that I'm stitching my voice into a buzzing, jostling web of other viewpoints, all aggregating and interlacing in similar ways.
posted by jhcudlin at 8:19 AM
3 Comments:
Some of us will not "join" Facebook, so one thing to keep in mind is that whatever it may seem like, Facebook is not public.
Good point. I will say, though, that facebook has become pervasive/invasive in a way that its predecessors--myspace, friendster--didn't manage, and has wormed its way into people's lives pretty effectively. Like a lot of people I know, I get my fb updates on my blackberry, which means I'm continuously updated on all sorts of things I couldn't possibly need to know about 350+ of my closest friends. I don't know that it's productive, or useful, but it's there, and I've certainly been seduced by it: the illusion of contact/intimacy with hundreds of people.
One thing to consider. I've been blogging for eight years, and at this point the ratio of traffic my blog gets from inbound links is about a tenth of what I get from search engines. Sometimes I say that my real audience is Google.
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