A few days ago Robert Scoble posted an entry to his blog talking about how tech blogging has become ruled by PR agencies, 'troll commenters', 'shiny objects' and one day conversations. I am not a tech blogger but his thoughts are becoming more and more applicable to the blogosphere as a whole.
What I found most interesting and which has been my reservation since day one of blogging is that it often seems you are writing for the moment and not for a lifetime. However when I often spend an hour in front of a blank screen thinking about what I am going to write, to then take the time to do so, I write to create something that lasts.
When you're blogging you are doing something different then when you're writing on a website or writing a book. There times you write for the moment but yet you keep it stored for a lifetime. It seems to be an unspoken blogger's ethic. I am going to defy this yet I continueìng blogging and not turning to essay writing. I try to write most of my blog posts as mini-essays though; content that can be read now or in ten years. I also encourage everyone to keep the conversation alive. Good writing is timeless. Many of the discussion points I raise deserve to still be discussed in a week from now (also do this on other blogs). I differ from a lot of bloggers by no longer looking at visitor statistics but rather judge my posts on the comments they've received.
I also find myself having different behavior when I visit a website than when I visit a blog. If I go to a blog I read the latest post, sometimes two and then I leave. There could be a wealth of great content but because the nature of the site I don't look further. If I go to a website (they still exist) I often find myself reading far more pages. To conclude, I think for those of us who live the fast paced internet life we have become trained to filter out content. Blogs just make it easy for us by all we have to do is look at the post date.
I am implementing a few changes. I have unpublished a lot of the posts that are no longer relevant and I'll continue to do this with each "in-the-moment post". Once I find a good plugin to move these posts to a separate section of the website I'll do that. Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to redesign this blog so that it encourages every new visitor to go and read all posts.