I missed it by a week. I just forgot about my five year anniversary writing this thing. Since February 10, 2001, it hasn’t been a Blogs to Riches experience and I’m glad. No advertising revenue, not now, not ever. I steadfastly refuse to think about writing in these terms:
A blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their laurels. Federated Media owner John Battelle recently published a book on Google, and while on the book tour, he neglected his own well-trafficked blog (No. 81 on Technorati’s rankings) for several days. “And suddenly I was getting all these e-mails going, ‘If you don’t get your shit together, I’m out of here,’ ” he recalls. He stayed up late that night frantically adding posts. “If you start sucking,” he says, “it’s through.”
I suck. I suck a lot. I fall to the bottom and drown because I can’t breathe the water. I didn’t start it to further a career either. I’m oddly ambivalent about audience, and no one succeeds with that approach. I’ve not only refused to engage with most of the “public” save a handful of people who have read me for a long time, but I’ve stopped (verbally) engaging with myself. It isn’t that I don’t care, though that would be quite punk of me, but rather that interaction is only one of several reasons why I do this. For a long while, interacting with any sort of “sphere” has been near the bottom of the priorities. Growing myself has been the major priority. The moments of clarity have been few and far between.
Instead, there have been increasing networks of associations, lately more visual rather than verbal that dominate my public space. Some of it makes sense to me. Much of it doesn’t. If you can’t make sense of it, you’re not alone. This blog has become more like a coral than a shark. It grows slowly accreting its way along as a filter of things that concern me.
