Blogging Used to Be Different
I like blogging. I like it a lot. It gives me an outlet and offers an opportunity to connect and dialogue.
Well, ideally it does…..
Blogging – 5 years ago – was a sort of cluttered mass of people writing about what they ate for lunch, how a band they loved was rocking it, or what book they were reading. It was much more like my current twitter stream than my current google reader subscriptions.
Before I understood how Google Reader worked, I simply had 20 blogs bookmarked and I’d manually go through and open each one to see if they’d posted anything new.
It used to be raw.
Now it feels a lot like a corporate vehicle. The interaction between crowd and content provider is much the same as me and my cable company. They show me things I like so my eyeballs see the advertisements.
I get it. It’s fine. The game has matured. No big deal.
But I miss it a little bit…..
I keep up with a lot of ministry blogs. Hundreds! I guess the thing that I’ve seen less of is originality. Its crazy to me how many people lack ideas to blog about. It’s crazy how 1-2 people can cause 25 people to write on the se topic.
Your post caused some self-reflection. As I look back over the past 5 years of my blog I think I’ve matured and gotten better as a writer. More importantly, I hope I haven’t become too corporate in any way. In some ways I’ve gotten deeply personal. In other ways I’ve had to not write about my day to day life at work because I really can’t get away with disclosing stuff because all of my coworkers read my blog and try to figure out the symbolism of what I’m writing, when.
If I have a desire for blogging in te next 5 years, it’s to see true citizen journalism take off.
Your blog is far from corporate sounding.
One big shift I noticed was the move from using blog posts as a discussion tool. I remember when the blogs I was reading would link to the original article where the idea started and then carry on the conversation. The original blogger would see the trackback and then check out the discussion on the second blog. Maturation of wordpresses layered commenting & spam blog posts probably killed this.