3 years ago, I wrote this blog birthday post (abridged) . . .
2 years ago today, I got brave enough to make my blog public. This is the 193rd post since then. My Blogger profile says I’ve been on Blogger since November 2003, which is when I came back from Internet Librarian, inspired to blog. There were lots of posts back then, but one day I (foolishly) deleted them, thinking I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say.
Lots of studies have been done on why people blog. Just today, the venerable Michael Stevens of Tame the Web wrote about the ideology of blogging. I identify with the comment in his post: “It amazed me how ingrained in my life the act of blogging had become.” I am often aware of how what a great blog post a certain experience would make. Now, if only I had time to act on all those inspirations.
I recently said to a colleague that blogging was so “yesterday.” I guess what I really meant was that blogging has become so mainstream that it’s hardly a phenomenon any more. We just accept and expect that the voices of our culture are heard through the blogosphere.
I ended the post with “Wonder what this blog will have to say in another 2 years.” Well, it’s now 3 years later. I’ve definitely become less prolific; at times the blog has been downright dormant. It could have something to do with a career move. Or maybe I just ran out of things to say. Posts have been less frequent at times. But I see that I did expound on lots of things happening in my life. There were other things happening that as a Director, I didn’t want to talk on in a public venue. Whatever . . .
I also note my statement “blogging is so yesterday.” Nothing has particularly replaced it. We all moved to Facebook, where we post much shorter thoughts. Then we got worried about privacy and limited our thoughts to only our Friends. But then we moved to Twitter – so much for privacy. I tweeted a couple of tweets, then became a Twitter-quitter. I see in my twitter-quitter post that I preserved my name, but I’ve forgotten it. Oh well.
Looking back at my blog (and a few others) from 5 years ago, I do see some changes. For a while, I wrote for a collaborative library blog where we devoted a fair amount of posts proclaiming — look who just started a blog. Many blogs were kind of amateurish. We went through the spelling-doesn’t-count phase. Who’re you kidding? Of course it does! Do I want a prospective employer reading whatever I dashed off with no proof-reading? The blogs that hung around have gotten more polished (oops, gotta work on that one). Lots of blogs, I suspect, are written by someone other than the name at the top. That wouldn’t apply to librarians, of course ;^)
So here I am, blogging into my 6th year. I like the idea of writing for the world, as much as I want. Facebook is for a limited number of Friends (a whole lot of cousins). Twitter — well, I quit that, remember? Wikis? Never got into that, except for a few mission-specific.
So, this ends post #245. Happy birthday, Blog! Where’s the cake?