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rfmcdonaldJim Belshaw's meditation last month on the changing blogosphere is something I've been thinking about for quite a while. What has blogging become?
I haven't experienced that sort of compression, if anything the reverse. The number of blogs I active read has risen, partly because I have used a RSS reader for the past two years and no longer have to visit each blog site again and again, but mostly because I've actively sought out new blogs whether through Google searches (last year's social science blog expansion came from) or through links from other friends' blogs or through recommendations I've actively sought out from other people. I think I've got a handle on the different elements of my online presentation. I link to each new Demography Matters post; I maintain a certain low level of activity of Flickr, uploading pictures of my own and commenting on other, often consolidating relations I have with other blogger;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nhw kindly pointed me to a Facebook app that let me import my Livejournal posts and I use my Facebook account to post more links and videos and whatnot of interest (think of it as extra content; and, I use Twitter alternatively as a slow-motion chat program, a way to share links with people of note, and somewhere I can post links to my non-[LINK] posts (like this one) with the help of bit.ly. My experience of the blogosphere over the past eight years (!) has been one of increasing integration.
This integration, though, doesn't necessarily correspond to personalization. One person I know unfriended me on Livejournal (not on Facebook, thankfully) because this blog (unlike my Facebook account) had very little about me, [NON BLOG] posts having become increasingly rare since that April 2003 trip to Toronto when I decided to post some blog-like postings for fun. I read other bloggers' posts, I link to them, I add commentary about them to my own blog, but it's fairly rare that I go and comment at the blogs themselves. I've tried my best to become acquainted with new blogs, to try to move beyond my own personal biases, but while I've substantially expanded the blogroll over the years I can't say that the blogs on the blogroll are necessarily very different from those biases.
The blogosphere isn't nearly as dynamic as it was in the first half of the last decade. The blogosphere has set, with its own conventions and relationships and rivalries between bloggers; the blogosphere has become disenchanted, the blogosphere has become institutionalized. I'm not sure if there's any way around this apart from continuing to try to produce new material and create new relationships.
Looking back over the blogs plus Facebook and Twitter feeds left me with a feeling of fragmentation: it's partly that I have more blogs on my list; more that so many of the blogs that I used to read have become irregular or even vanished; more still that Facebook and Twitter have developed as alternative mechanisms; most, my feeling that the little village that I used to talk about a lot has somehow morphed into a more anonymous urban sprawl.
I think that this is partly my own fault. Writing on a daily basis is quite hard, harder still when blogging is one part of a spreading writing load. I spend less time interacting with other bloggers, more time just writing. The pleasure drops. However, it's also a symptom of genuine fragmentation.
The best independent blogs combined thought with a dash of the personal. Some of these blogs have become Facebooked or Twittered to the detriment of the blogs. Sure, I read the Facebook or Twitter streams, but they don't compensate. Further, I often see the same short form material repeated. The length of time it takes me to scan Facebook or Twitter is actually falling despite the increase in the number of items. To make matters worse, some favourite blogs have simply vanished.
I have told this story before.
I long time ago local retailer Joe Hanna complained that Armidale was getting smaller. I blinked, because the city had been going through a growth phase. When I asked what he meant, he said that whereas it used to take him all morning to get the mail, it now took half an hour. The difference lay in the conversation along the half block from the store to the post office and back. He used to spend lots of time seeing people and yarning, now there were very few people to talk too.
I haven't experienced that sort of compression, if anything the reverse. The number of blogs I active read has risen, partly because I have used a RSS reader for the past two years and no longer have to visit each blog site again and again, but mostly because I've actively sought out new blogs whether through Google searches (last year's social science blog expansion came from) or through links from other friends' blogs or through recommendations I've actively sought out from other people. I think I've got a handle on the different elements of my online presentation. I link to each new Demography Matters post; I maintain a certain low level of activity of Flickr, uploading pictures of my own and commenting on other, often consolidating relations I have with other blogger;
nhw kindly pointed me to a Facebook app that let me import my Livejournal posts and I use my Facebook account to post more links and videos and whatnot of interest (think of it as extra content; and, I use Twitter alternatively as a slow-motion chat program, a way to share links with people of note, and somewhere I can post links to my non-[LINK] posts (like this one) with the help of bit.ly. My experience of the blogosphere over the past eight years (!) has been one of increasing integration.This integration, though, doesn't necessarily correspond to personalization. One person I know unfriended me on Livejournal (not on Facebook, thankfully) because this blog (unlike my Facebook account) had very little about me, [NON BLOG] posts having become increasingly rare since that April 2003 trip to Toronto when I decided to post some blog-like postings for fun. I read other bloggers' posts, I link to them, I add commentary about them to my own blog, but it's fairly rare that I go and comment at the blogs themselves. I've tried my best to become acquainted with new blogs, to try to move beyond my own personal biases, but while I've substantially expanded the blogroll over the years I can't say that the blogs on the blogroll are necessarily very different from those biases.
The blogosphere isn't nearly as dynamic as it was in the first half of the last decade. The blogosphere has set, with its own conventions and relationships and rivalries between bloggers; the blogosphere has become disenchanted, the blogosphere has become institutionalized. I'm not sure if there's any way around this apart from continuing to try to produce new material and create new relationships.
