During the couple of years when I was a blogger in remission the world of blogging seems to have evolved, to have moved on– not only did the number of blogs explode (I’m part of the generation that remember when the Tots100 was only about 100 blogs…) but the way that blogging happened seemed to have changed
Without wanting to sound all Monty Python about this when I started blogging there was a community – a bunch of people that I grew to know. Some of them became incredible real life friends, some of them have become wonderful virtual friends and a few I didn’t really get on with an we never kept a connection. The virtual world was just like the real world but by stepping into it I had discovered a new facet to my world
That’s how I like to think of my virtual life
My virtual life is another part of my real world life, one in which I have the benefits of friendships plus the camaraderie of twitter and so on but one that adds something over and above my real world life. In the real world I am rushing around and struggling to meet friends, I don’t have time for regular chats but the virtual world is easier to dip in and out of when I have 5 minutes and I can still keep in touch, keep involved in the conversation
The only trouble is that those platforms seem to have moved away from the conversation and seem to be largely populated with people shouting out that they have links that you should click. Twitter has always been somewhere to flag new posts / interesting links but there was also conversation and connection in the mix. Now if you check back over a lot of people’s posts they are doing nothing but shout out about what they have and there is no engagement
Is there some other place we can go for that chat and connection? Has everyone else moved on whilst I’ve been hiding away?
Blogging seems to be less about the community too, there seem to be less comments, less connections and more commercialisation. I like to read blogs, I like to follow the story of people I’ve known for years and to comment and chat with them but that seems to be something that is a minority sport now – lots of people are writing but, with the exception of comment rings and linky-fests, are people actually going out there and reading what else is going on rather than just publishing their own stuff
I learnt a lot about writing, a lot about what works from reading other blogs and learning from them – if I had just been sat here publishing whatever jumped into my brain and not read those other blogs I suspect I’d have given up long ago, the comments and encouragement were what kept me going and helped me through
And then there are the reviews – I understand that money from blogs can make a big difference (heck it has made a difference to me, if I can cover the costs of running this thing that is a massive plus for me) but there is a line between publishing a few reviews that fit in amongst the other stuff and reviewing every little thing, entering every ‘post about this and we might make you our ambassador’ and diluting the good stuff that makes people come over and read your blog to such an extent you end up in my folder of bloggers I like but I can’t bear to wade through all the dross to get to the good stuff (I probably should just unsubscribe but it seems so final)
Don’t even get me started on the click-bait bloggers – the ones that sit there desperately trying to write something controversial, to become the Katie Hopkins of the blogging world and seem to have lost sight of what it is they want to achieve. If it’s just masses of people clicking on a post and going ‘tsk another attempt to go viral’ then great but so what? What next? We already have one Katie Hopkins and I’m fairly certain there isn’t demand for another – are you just doing this to create a ‘brand’ based on upsetting people or is there some great strategy I just can’t grasp?
Alex wrote an interesting post about whether D list ‘celebs’ and bloggers are beginning to converge – from what I’m seeing there is a tiny group of bloggers who have started to head in that direction, a massive bunch of bloggers who aspire to reach those heights and to get the free stuff and a small niche of those of us who write because we want to write, are vaguely flattered but a little bewildered by the commercial stuff and who hanker after the Good Old Days
I’m not sure there is a right or a wrong way to do these things (although writing that bloggers only breed to get free stuff is frankly insulting and more than a little bit hurtful to those of us who have had a difficult journey), variety is the spice of life but I’ll continue to value those who are authentic, original, those who comment and connect and to prioritise my time reading from those who inhabit that niche and to scroll past the rest
The post What has the blogging world evolved into? appeared first on Muddling Along Blog.
