When I say that I miss blogging I mean so many things. And most of them return for a time when Blaugust comes around.
Back when I first started blogging, I was using free open diary. I loved the community based journaling I found there, at a time when I really needed it. That was in 2001 when my husband had suddenly enlisted in the Army and I had a LOT of adjusting and learning, and whining and venting to do. People with like interests seemed to just find each other and from those connections more connections were made with friends of friends. Eventually I outgrew those sites and they staarted losing members to new ones, and I found myself at Live Journal, loving the same things there. But with my decorative control.
That decorative control led me to start poking around with geocities and I eventually had my own website, then my own domain, a passing ability to manipulate html, and still people managed to find each other and make connections, and a whole community. This first happened with web rings, and then yahoo groups made it even easier. My sites grew and changed, and topics came and went, but I always had a home in blogging. Especially when WoW blogging was huge. That’s how I got to know Beghast over at The Aggronaut in fact, and many others who I still stay connected to on social networks.
But one day, it felt like the Blogosphere just…stopped turning. The updates stopped, the comments stopped. Where I used to find my gaming info from a friendly blogger, I was presented with ad riddled SEO filled magazines, wikis, or reddits, or videos. And I still miss it. Because without other blogs, it’s like shouting into the void. So here I am, doing Blaugust 2023 with the hopes that I find that village again, because I really miss emptying my chatty brain into my blog!
I loved the more active age of blogging, too. And I know exactly the feeling you speak of.
However, looking at the number of participants in Blaugust this year, it’s heartening to see some folks still wanting to give it a go. New folks, too!
Can’t stop! Won’t stop! 🙂
I do agree that at some point blogging just stopped and social medias and the digg/reddits of the world took over.
Ironically I got into blogging because I lamented the fact that content I was dropping into old-school forums was easily lost if those forums shut down. I still participated in forums but I took my content to my blog for safe(r) keeping. Unfortunately replying in a forum with “hey I wrote a response to this on my blog ” quickly gets you kicked out.
Double unfortunately that is basically how must of social media is now-a-days; it is frowned to link to your own content on your own site as most sites want to lock you in to providing your hard writing labor to their ecosystem. I can’t blame them either with the SEO spam content out there.
So… yep… blogging has pretty much been ruined.
But I started over a year ago posting once a day again and I enjoy my thoughts going no where.
I get this feeling a lot too. It’s exactly why I keep my space ticking along, even when I’m not using it very much. It is my space, I don’t want to lose that again. And the community that you have with blogging is everything. I love it.