In the vein of blogs seeing a revival, Paul Graham Raven over at Velcro City Tourist Board has a good post that’s worth a read about returning to blogging (I am hopeful that the revival proves true, but the rationale and reasons he calls out are valid regardless of whether he wanders off again):
Of course, that rolling discourse hasn’t vanished; it just migrated onto faster, more accessible and more populous platforms, and in doing so became far faster, far thinner, and far more clamorous. Sure, there’s still blogging going on, too, but it’s changed a lot, and in some places died back almost entirely: the Genre Fiction Blog Wars in which I was once a footsoldier appear to have gone full scorched-earth in the years since I went AWOL from the front lines, with many once-vital sites vanished, shuttered or abandoned; my RSS reader is full of URLs I still can’t quite bear to cull, in case they should suddenly start up again like a much-loved numbers station in the night. I’m looking for new sources more relevant to my current incarnation as an academic, but the process is slow, not least because the old tradition of cross-linking and inter-site commentary (and, yes, argument) has been replaced by something more decontextualised, more lone(ly)-voices-in-the-wilderness. I dunno, maybe it’s just me overinterpreting five years of change through a very personal lens, but it’s definitely not the same any more; you can make your own value-judgement on that qualitative shift.
I’ve felt it too — while I’ve certainly been noticing a return to the Isle of Blogging, the energy is different. Less optimistic, perhaps, but less drawn in by the desire for a crowd as well. We’re here because we want to be.
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