Decline of the blogger:
I call this my web site. Technically it could be called a web log or “blog.” The term is new. My spell checker, usually so trendy, does not recognize it. I was working on something like this many years before I heard the term “blog.” In fact the ruins of my old site is still parked at “Wildsurmises.com.” I have not updated it in a long time. I’m not sure I know how. So it is now to be counted as among the abandoned blogs.
It turns out that there are a lot of such artifacts. (An Empire Gives Way ECONOMIST vol. 395 no. 8688 June 26, 2010 page 62) The landscape or rather the cyberscape is filled with abandoned sites. Mine really isn’t abandoned. It says some things that I think are interesting but are not appropriate to this site.
The rate of growth of the number of blogs is slowing down. Other social networks have taken over. I have joined one of them, but I find I don’t spend much time with it. If anybody wants me, my email address is unchanged and I still have my telephone.
The blogs that continue to do well are the specialized ones that address one subject. That certainly is this site. Like the survivor of the Nancy Bell I sit and croak at a single joke. (There is something odd about that ditty you don’t notice at first. The old sailor lists everybody he cannibalizes but not himself.) For more than two years I have found new ways in which it seems to have an effect. This particular posting of course is not about the subject but about the practice of posting things.
My style is a little different from the others. Traditionally the most recent entry comes first on the list. For instance there was a recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Had I any thoughts on it, I could put them here and not expect you to know anything about what I thought about anything else. Here I do need to be understood more or less from the beginning. So I started out leading with the best I had at the time and kept it that way because any other plan would confuse me if nobody else. In the beginning I was posting something on alternate days but I fell so far behind that I started posting every day. Some day I think we will get back to that story with the ciphers I started.
While the so called blogosphere is losing its appeal to a lot of people, the interest in this site continues to grow. It is very slow, but it grows. Sometimes there is a flurry of interest. So we are swimming against the tide and at least not losing distance.
There have been 4,508 visitors counted so far.