Blogging is a strange activity. There’s a bit of vanity about declaring that your thoughts and views are so important that they deserve their own little corner of the internet.
When I first started blogging back in 2002, the tools were extremely limited, but if you felt that you had something to say to the world, a blog was the only option (unless you simply created web pages in HTML of course. The rise of social media ‘knocked blogging on the head’ to a great extent. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) took over as the main platforms for sharing on the interwebs. The barriers to entry were (and are) much lower. When this change was beginning to happen around 2006-7, I don’t we really understood the implications of what was happening. Sharing on Facebook might have been ‘easier’ than posting on WordPress, but the move from being the author of your own blog to being a product sold to advertisers by a budding billionaire was a profound change.
I’ve been away from blogging for a little while and only recently came to appreciate how much I have missed it. The vanity is still there to an extent, but this is largely countered by the humbling experience of trying to establish a blogging presence now compared with 20 years ago. You might suppose that even a self-hosted blog would be easier to set up now than it was back then, but that has not been my experience.
The technical barrier is significant, but it is nowhere near as daunting as the hurdle presented by the task of getting anyone to take any notice! But why should they? I came back to blogging without any expectations of setting the world on fire, fuelled to some extent by that vanity I mentioned at the beginning of this post, but not really expecting anyone else to care all that much.
Which, as it turns out, is just as well. But I’m going to be blogging anyway.
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