Serious Blogging is an Oxymoron
Serious blogging is an oxymoron, at least that’s what I thought.
When I decided to start a website where I could display my research and writing on early American crime, the first problem I faced was finding the mechanism for making that happen. I knew some HTML, so I could create a website from scratch, but having done so a couple times in the past, I knew how difficult and time-consuming it could be. I also knew that my coding skills were rudimentary at best, so if I wanted to create a good-looking website, I would have to devote a lot of time to learning web design. This option was not optimal. I wanted to spend my time research and writing, not learning how to code and design websites.
The alternative was to create a blog. This option was a tough one to swallow. How could I align myself with a genre that seemed to celebrate the expression of outrageous opinions, public displays of private feelings, and droll reflections on popular culture? In the end, the technological ease that made it possible for anyone and everyone to create a blog was too enticing for me to pass up.
If I were going to start a blog, I decided, I was going to do something different. Rather than conform to the principle of writing short posts on blogs, my posts were going to be as long as I needed them to be to cover the topic I was writing about. Rather than write in an offhand, conversational style, my writing was going to be more academically formal. And rather than keep a thematic series of posts to no more than a handful, my thematic series were going to be epic in proportion.
Of course, I soon discovered that there were many serious and scholarly blogs that were being written well before I started mine and that they were employing some of the same practices that I thought were so radical in my approach.
This past Sunday, the New York Times ran an article titled “Blogs Falling In an Empty Forest” that cites a 2008 survey by Technorati stating that out of the 133 million blogs the search site tracks, only 7.4 million have been updated in the last 120 days. In other words, 95% of the blogs out there now lie dormant.
One reason the article gives for this drop in blog activity is that people have started to grow weary of revealing too much of their personal lives online. Another reason is that the number of visitors that many bloggers expected, or the amount of money they thought they would make from it, never materialized. Many of these ex-bloggers, the article speculates, now spend their time on Facebook or Twitter.
The demise of frivolous blogs reminds me of when the World Wide Web was just beginning to catch on. At the time, anyone and everyone seemed to have a website about their wacky interests. Of course, most of those websites have since disappeared and have been replaced by more serious ones.
Perhaps the age of serious blogging is now upon us.
Still, I can’t quite bring myself to refer to my Early American Crime website as my blog.
For tips and links to resources that can help you get a blog up and running, visit the Blogging section of this website.
