i’ve just finished reading marco’s tumblr post on blogging with an audience, and it made me think about my own blogging habits. particularly, in which he wrote:

We’ll see more complete people blogging their whole lives, not just trying to emulate magazine columns or news sites. Some of them will get large audiences, but most won’t — and it won’t matter.

and as such, now have i seen the blogging life cycle?

i started to keep a livejournal in 2001, which arguably, is not a blog. i wrote it for me. i wrote it for friends online, most of whom i didn’t know at first but some eventually became my friends in real life (and still are, you all know who you are—thank you always). i wrote freely in it and often, sometimes on more days than not.

so what happened? after nine years of more or less detailed scrawls of the highs and lows that comprise my life, the idea of having all of it available online to prying eyes is just a little too uncomfortable for me. i can look back at it and see how much i’ve grown and i can learn from my neurotic patterns, but how about the casual passerby? most of all of this has been locked down now, with sparse entries visible to a trusted few, and in the case of the last few years, i’ve only posted mostly impersonal entries on a completely different site.

perhaps this is what happens after years of oversharing. this is the third incarnation of a sort of blog i’ve kept, and i barely write in it. what i do want to do is share things that i liked and a few things that i’ve made, and that’s all that is here now. i’m not a blogger.

(unless, of course, we’re saying a blog is just a log kept on the web.)

long-form is hard. i’ve all but given up blogging, having kept some sort of online journal or blog for over 8 years now. it has just gotten old and i don’t have anything interesting to say. most other people have nothing interesting to say as well, and now we have 140 characters to say it in.

my ugly last blog of sorts devolved into a sort of link junkyard. i thought the links were interesting themselves, but it was a pain to look at and you had to click through 2 different screens just to get to the embedded link excerpts. i kept the vox blog as long as i did because i was lazy about changing my workflow, and because it had a cool short-ish url. i dutifully killed it today to let the UI rest in peace.

there was a time when i used to write regularly. i don’t think it is a coincidence that my writing dropped off around the same time i actually started to use my twitter account (it spent its first year dormant out of protest against noise). we’ll just have to see how this one goes.

PS: i keep meaning to read the attention economy of social media by adrian chan, but my attention span right now is that of someone who procrastinates in many browser tabs.