Karl Elvis On The Death Of Blogging
I’m going to be self-indulgent today (Ha! Don’t ask about all the other days…) and post some words about the reputed death of blogging. Karl Elvis has been a friend of ErosBlog since forever, and here’s what he had to say about six weeks ago, on the occasion of his blog’s ninth anniversary:
As social media finally got a real foothold, blogging crashed and burned.
That probably makes sense. Blogging was a fad, something of an era; every fucking person on the internet seemed to have a blog for a six month period there. And then they didn’t. Abandoned blogs are the ghost town of the decade; people will tour them some day, dodging tumble weeds and spam links and stealing mementos.
Actually they won’t. Because unlike ghost towns, blogs leave nothing behind but empty hearts and minds. No blood no guts no brains at all.
There are exceptions, obviously. Great writing happened, and is still happening, in the context of blogs. No, the issue wasn’t a lack of content, it was the opposite. It was that signal-to-noise problem that chases us around the internet; when something works, really works, it has the life span of a snowflake. Perfect, brilliant, ephemeral, and then gone, lost in the waves of it’s own success. The sheer mass of irrelevancy and stupidity swamped the goodness and buried it.
But you know that. And anyway you’re not reading; who reads blogs anymore?
I wonder if Karl hasn’t accidentally put his finger on one of the reasons why I’ve recently gotten weirdly obsessive about tracking down image relationships and attributions. Some people do still read blogs, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I never did any long-read “great writing” for writing’s sake; I was always about the “hey, look at this!” with my value added being a snarky sentence or at most a few paragraphs of commentary. On a bad day, it can look (and feel) like I’m just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress; what makes it a good day is the feeling of value added, of context provided. Boost signal; filter noise.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=9429
“I’m just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress”
Fabulous. What a great line. That one’s getting quoted.
Thx for the link, brother!
You’re welcome, Karl. Quote away!
I subscribe to this blog for the commentary. Naughty pictures are everywhere, the context and comments you provide make these ones stand out.
Thanks, O!
You know the other funny thing about the new world of blogging?
Nobody comments.
I got at least dozens of hits form your link, and not one comment, which is the theme now. I kind of want to install a ‘like’ button just to see if it’s an attention span problem (if they can’t do it with one click, they don’t want to do it).
Maybe it’s just me, but *I* can’t abide blogs with comments turned off.
That’s so, Karl. I still get a few comments, very often from long-term readers, but never the ongoing conversations with dozens of comments like “back in the day”.
There actually is a WordPress plugin that installs a “like” button but it uses a huge honking wodge of nasty-looking javascript that loads inline in the page header, so I haven’t tried deploying it.
I’ll admit I was one of the people that clicked without comment. That said, generally I don’t comment unless I have something useful (in my eyes anyways) to say. After running 3 different gaming forums I was tired of the juvenile “FIRST!” comments to everything new that was posted to increase their individual post counts. That is why I would rather lurk than comment. I know I’ve been here for at least 5 years, and I’m sure I could probably count all my comments on my fingers alone.
1. I still read blogs daily.
2. I added this blog to the rotation due to the pictures, and it stayed due to the commentary.
Keep up the good work!
“It was that signal-to-noise problem that chases us around the internet; when something works, really works, it has the life span of a snowflake. Perfect, brilliant, ephemeral, and then gone, lost in the waves of it’s own success. The sheer mass of irrelevancy and stupidity swamped the goodness and buried it”
I’m sorry, but when I read this all I hear is hipster whining. XD
Molly if there was video of you telling this to Karl Elvis in person without the laugh emoticon, I would totally pay (small amounts of) real money to see it! ;-)
Also I’m so far out in red-state America these days that all I know about hipsters I learned from watching people complain about them on Twitter. I don’t think I’ve ever actually encountered one in the wild.
If you were online in the 1990s and have stumbled around the interweb since, you’d have noticed the changes. Not that I want to sound like an elitist wanker but (as I will) fifteen years back, it was something of an avant-garde. Today it’s more like network teev and google decides which channel you’ll watch.
I suspect that your blog is yet more popular and important than you imagine.
[…] Plus, look on the bright side: after the suicide of Tumblr, I no long need to worry that I’m “just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress.” Tumblr porn? Add it to the lengthy list of things that ErosBlog has […]
Heh. Posted in 2013. Boy was that true.
…but here’s me back at it after a long break.
You were not wrong! And welcome back.