941 Why Blogs Die

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Yesterday, looking for my past entry about Nephew at my mother's funeral, I reread a lot of my old entries, and was amazed at how much my journal has changed. The difference from the beginning on AOL in June of 2004 and now is amazing. I used to write a lot of opinion and observation. Now it's mainly "I went there, I did that", without a lot of thought or comment.

I started the journal on AOL when I was just starting to come out of the depression and isolation I had gone into when Jay died. I used it to work through my feelings, to remember our relationship, to think about what I had learned, to break the isolation. I needed to think some things through, to get some things out, to put them outside myself so I could let them go. I don't have to keep going over those things now in my head, they are someplace safe forever, not lost.

The journal didn't always show what was going on in my mind. The surface things I wrote about were often just the waves on top. I sometimes went into rants, which was an improvement on the prior three years of not feeling anything. It was an exercise in feeling.

Then Roman happened, and the character of the journal changed. Emotional stress. Too much feeling too suddenly, and no one to talk to about what was happening.

Some people who know that I keep a blog (but don't know where it is) have asked why (especially when their only knowledge of blogs is MySpace and the like, which horrifies them, they can't imagine me doing THAT!). The "why" changes as conditions change. Right now it's sort of just to keep track of my days. My daily notes.

So then thinking about that got me thinking about how over the past two years, many of the blogs I had been following have died, or have gone private, and I wondered if they "got old". I guess many of them probably died of old age and boredom. They had outlived their purpose.

Blogs with a theme, like photos, political comment or current events, seem to last longer than personal blogs. When they die, it's often because their readership got too large, trolls moved in, the comments area took on a life of its own, becoming virtually a chat room, and the blog owner finally lost patience with mediating arguments, taking abuse from idiots, and cleaning up the comments. So they close and lock the doors. Sometimes they open shop again in a different "storefront", under a different name.

Some personal blogs start out in the "I went here, I did that" vein, then some late night, the owner drops a bomb, a personal revelation that scares him or her, and they disappear. It appears to me that the need to make the revelation, to come clean, was probably the impetus for the blog in the first place, but the owner wasn't ready yet, took too long to get to it, and in the meantime built up a readership that they suddenly realized were NOT the people they really wanted to reveal this stuff to. Panic, end of blog.

Something I saw a lot of on AOL was scammer blogs, filled with sob stories of mistreatment, misfortune, and how bravely the blog owner is coping. They eventually build a loyal following of syncophants who will valiantly defend their hero against anyone who questions the inconsistencies in the stories, the blatant impossibilities, the similarities to old novels. Then comes the "it would make so much difference if I had a ....". I watched one woman scam a new computer with all the bells and whistles out of her readership. She was working on a car (her old one being too unreliable to pick up her emotionally disabled son at the residental facility for his Christmas visit home, etc, sob sob), when she suddenly went private. I guess she had her base of suckers, and didn't want any more of those nasty "why don't you look for a job" or "how come you can go visit a boyfriend in another state when you can't feed your child" hecklers. Easier to milk her victims in private, without interference.

And then there's the folks who talk about their life which (oh, wow!) intersects with the lives of others (no kidding!), or a job, and the others find the blog, and have fits. What they don't realize is that although they recognize themselves in entries, nobody else would recognize them! Only another friend in common or coworker could recognize them, and then if what it written is true and known, how can they reasonably object? I mean, is the blog owner not allowed to have observations? An opinion? Is it a law that you have to keep your opinions to yourself? And don't give me that "to the whole world!" crap. Nobody knows who you ARE! But the blogger gets so much guff he or she has to censor the blog out of existence.

I don't tell very many people who know me how to find this blog, but if anyone put even an ounce of thought into it they'd know exactly what to look for. And I don't care. Anything I may have said about anyone else is the truth as I see it, and certainly my opinion, and I am a very open person, so they already know what that opinion is. There should be no shocks. (Well, maybe the ditz from an entry or two back, but everyone knows she's a ditz, so it wouldn't be shocking to anyone else, and she's such a ditz that even given the date and the others at the table, she wouldn't recognize herself, and of all the people we know in common, she's the only one who would be stupid enough to explain it to the ditz. So, I'm safe.)

So, blogs grow up, learn, mature, and then either commit suicide, are murdered, or have fulfilled their purpose and die of old age.

Mine is going to limp on forever, through dementia, if necessary. Just like me. Something exciting might happen at any moment, and neither the blog nor I want to miss it.