Change

Wow, it has been 28 days since my last post.  Where did the time go?  Right now, I’m wondering if my blogging days are coming to an end.  I have been blogging for five years now, and in that time the world has changed.  People no longer come to my blog to check up on my life.  They get my Tweets, or my Facebook status these days.  I keep forgetting to post photos on this site; cropping and sizing photos by hand is much more difficult than uploading to a social networking site or to Flickr.  My efforts to make money off the site have fallen flat as well — I finally removed my Google Ads, primarily so I would stop obsessing over my click rate and pennies I made with each click (it took nearly 3 years to make $100).  Blogging, like e-mail, is quickly going the way of the Dodo (just as librarians finally figure out what a weblog is).  The other day, I asked my 18-year-old nephew if he used e-mail — he doesn’t.  He texts.

In the same way that people used to blog, now there is MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for uploading photos  and keeping in touch with friends.  It’s more efficient, really.  Reading long blogrolls is much tougher than logging onto Facebook, where each person is limited to about 150 characters and long-winded writers like myself can’t spend three pages on what we had for breakfast.  I thought I would write more in my blog when I finished my master’s degree, but it turns out I’ve written even less.  Now that I’m applying to the foreign service, I’m also worried about personal information that might be accessible on the web — the life of a public servant is quite different than the life of a grad student, so I’ve been going through the blog, taking down posts and feeling as wary as a jackrabbit in a coyote den.

Maybe I will start a new blog, one more focused on computer programming and design.  I like the privacy of Facebook, where I can limit who can view the photos of my children, rather than having my whole life out on the web for the world to see.  I had once hoped that maybe blogging could be the writing career I always wanted, but, not surprisingly, the glut of web writers has made this field just as tough as print ever was.  The unfocused nature of this blog has also been problematic in that regard, too — people like to have a single topic to read about and to expect.

I’m not saying this is my last post, but I think my last post is just around the corner.  The site isn’t going anywhere — it’s paid up for a year — but I don’t know how much posting I’m going to do in the next few months.  If I do start another site, rest assured, readers, that I will certainly link to it here.

Thanks, everyone, for reading.  It’s meant a lot to me.