so ATSOT is now 5 years old, happy birthday blog. i feel like a neglectful parent, my offspring - unable to take care of itself - left to languish in a corner while i live the high life, throwing it scraps occasionally.
it's not that i don't think about blogging anymore, just that i don't actually, y'know, get down to doing it. there's something instantly stultifying about the blogger interface these days that somehow depresses me, or at least supresses my urge to communicate.
and i've become more secretive in my old age. sometimes i want to write something, but the urge to obfuscate it leaves me frustrated and my writing seems to be more abstract than the average horoscope.
but i will not abandon you, blog, you're still a weird part of me, and much beloved.
like every blogger in the world (or so it seems), i've been thinking about twitter lately.
twitter was founded by evan williams, who was a co-founder of blogger. it is "a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging [and] the Twitter website" (from the wikipedia entry. Those updates can also be sent to 'friends' (in that great web 2.0 sense) as text messages, and you can recieve the updates of the people you 'friend'.
i've had a twitter stream (log? page?) since january, but i'm yet to really see a point to it. honestly, it mostly seems like a pretty good way to stalk someone. and with stuff like twittervision (which is strangely mesmerising), it feels like just another way to see into the minutiae of strangers' lives (much like Blogger).
nonetheless, i suspect that if more of my (real-life) friends were using twitter, i might be more interested in it. certainly, one of the most appealing features of facebook is seeing people's updated statuses. if facebook made it possible to update your status by text - that would be great, and a twitter/facebook mashup (where your status updates were archived on a particular page) would be pretty fantastic.
the worst thing about not posting, is that the longer it goes on, the harder it gets to post. i can't imagine any of you thought that i was in some way 'striking' in honour of alan johnston (who still hasn't been released/found), but i definitely wasn't, that would have required an ego the size of a large country.
so i read a quote from this article on banksy from the new yorker, on kottke.org of all places:
"The graffitist's impulse is akin to a blogger's: write some stuff, quickly, which people may or may not read." and it really hit home that my blogger's impulse has been definitely mis-aligned recently - i'm so concerned about writing something amazing or somehow insightful that people will enjoy that actually i'm not posting at all.
actually blogs are (and should be) by their nature ephemeral - nothing i write here will every be worthy of elevation to the pantheon of literature, and i should be celebrating that by posting about anything that comes into my head, rather than worrying about how what i write will be perceived.
in future: shorter, more frequent postage, less angsting.
Labels: blogging, empty promises, meta
