My Blogger home page, from which I write this blog, includes a list of blogs I'm following. Nearly all of them are by people I know or have known, and the latest posts from each of these blogs pops up on the page so I can keep current on them.
Last night, out of curiosity, I clicked on the blog names to see whether I had missed anything. I found that the bloggers I've been following have become a quiet bunch. The latest posts were dated "8 months ago," "two months ago," "two years ago," "three years ago," etc. No wonder I've been reading fewer blogs lately.
I look at this two ways: (1) I've persevered and outlasted most of the bloggers I've known. I'm up to 823 posts, according to my Blogger home page, and I have 65 followers (although, admittedly, at least two of my followers have died — probably not as a result of reading my blog). I began writing a blog when I was a newspaper editor, and blogs were all the rage in the newspaper business. I never really thought I'd take the blogging world by storm, but I had hoped to generate some discussion and provoke some thoughts, either in agreement or in dissent. Alas, I've never made money off of blogging and have frequently wondered why I'm still doing it, nearly five years after leaving the newspaper business. I do it because it's a form of writing, and I enjoy writing, even if I know no one is reading it, except perhaps for 65 people (minus two or more).
My second look at this (#2) is that blogging has become passe. Now it's not blogging that is cutting edge. It's Twitter or Instagram or some other condensed brevity that I might not even be aware of. I see tweets quoted in news articles more often than I see blogs quoted. So while a few people are making some money off of their blogs, the public's attention seems to be directed more toward the 144 characters of a tweet. Celebrities do it. Politicians do it. "Even educated fleas do it ... Let's do a tweet!"
Bloggers: An endangered species?
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