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Thu | June 22, 2006
On Blogging
Tomorrow is my blog's birthday. Invisible Cube will be one year old.
I'd say the average lifespan of a blog is about a year. That's how old my Xanga was when I killed it. I killed it because I was tired of it, and because I knew that if I wanted those posts there was no easy way to save them. I killed it because I wanted to create a better blog (this one).
Now a year into this blog, remembering what happened to my last one at around this time, I am naturally a bit solicitous for its future. I say "kill" like I had agency in the death of my former blog, but really it just kind of died on me.
It had a lot to do with the reasons I just mentioned above- of which reasons number two and three have been addressed by my Xanga's reincarnation as Invisible Cube. But there is still the fatigue factor. A blog should be energizing, not exhausting. It should be fun, and not a chore or an obligation. I feel myself getting bored, wondering where this is going, if anywhere, and if it means anything or has any value. I haven't sorted it out yet. But I do know some things about my blog, and by extension, blogs in general.
Myths About Blogs
First, three myths about blogs. In January this year, I went to a reading for the book Best American Journalism of 2005 and this guy James Wolcott read his award-winning article about blogging. Nothing he said about blogs was true of my blog. They were all very familiar ideas, too- journalism, after all, mostly rehashes the same ideas in circulation. But I had never realized how wrong they all were.
One false belief is that blogs should be about something. My blog is about ______. If you can't fill in that blank there's something wrong, your blog is unfocused and illegitimate. "Theme" blogs exist, but there's a whole genre of blogs, typified by Xanga and Live Journal, which has nothing to do with theme, whose very structure is anti-theme. I think these "stuff I wrote" blogs are actually more common than theme blogs, and they're certainly a lot easier to sustain.
The blogger homepage used to say that you should pick a topic for your blog. Now it says, "Your blog is whatever you want it to be." So I guess they wised up. I think the idea that a blog has a topic or a theme was dominant a year ago. I definitely remember feeling obligated, when I started this blog, to have a theme. With some effort I overrode the idea and excused myself from it.
Another erroneous concept is that a blog should link to other blogs. This undoubtedly descends from the "The Link is King" school of thought-- that websites with more links to them are more important, that things on the internet sustain themselves by linking to other things. Also connected to this idea is the third myth, the belief that a blog needs comments. I distinctly remember Wolcott saying that links and comments were the lifeblood of a blog.
The lifeblood of a blog is the author writing posts and putting them up. Simple as that. You provide your own material-- it doesn't come from linking to others' materials, or from other people writing comments. In fact wanting links and comments is a fast way to insure your blog's demise, because it skews your focus and energy. You start to write things just to elicit reactions, and you lose track of what you need to write, what you need to think about. You worry too much about what others will think-- whether they will find it interesting, whether they will have anything to say in response.
This leads to my rules of blogging, which are mostly about not worrying about what other people will think.
Rules of Blogging
- Don't apologize for the blog. Resist the impulse to say Here is my blog, but you know I have been in a bad mood recently so it might seem bleh, or any number of excuses and disclaimers.
- Write about whatever you want. If you want to write about cake, write about cake. Don't try to be intellectual, or cover "important" topics. Also, just as sticking to a very narrow topic defined by a theme is problematic, trying to cover a variety of topics or to create a balanced representation of yourself and your interests will only make things difficult. Your blog is not you, it's just your blog.
My site motto is a quotation attributed to Katharine Hepburn: "If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."
- Don't look back (and don't delete posts). This is because if you look back, you will find something you don't like, and start to edit, rewrite, and delete... and there will be no end to it. Soon you will have deleted everything.
The blog reflects where you were at the time, and you need to accept that. In fact, if looking back at your blog doesn't make you cringe then you should be concerned because it means you're not getting any better. You should totally look back and say I can't believe I wrote that. Tomorrow I will look at this and say Why did I write this? What was I thinking? But I won't change a thing.
The easiest way to not destroy your own blog is to not read it. Post and don't look back.
- When in doubt, don't tell people about your blog. I am not sure why this is true but I know it is based on experience. I regret telling too many people about it at the outset. I sent out a mass email and I put it in my email signature. I'm sure I told people about it randomly. It grates on me.
You need just enough of an audience, just some, and not too much. Audience is an individual thing, and you need to think about whom you'd be comfortable having as your audience. I can tell you that the answer isn't "everyone, everyone I know."
- If you told too many people, know that no one is reading your blog anyway. Except for your closest friends and the stray secret admirer, everyone forgets about your blog within three months of finding out about it.
I have a vested interest in reading others' blogs, since I have one myself, and even I don't read them, not even the blogs of cute guys. I am assuming that everyone behaves like myself, which could be incorrect. But I don't think so.
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