Thursday, May 24, 2012

Where Is Everybody?

My daily blog list is huge. I have blogs I read for entertainment. I read agent blogs. Blogs written by other writers. I'm like a blog pack rat, there are so many of them.

But lately it seems that people just aren't updating them the way the used to. Weeks, sometimes months go by without any new posts. And I know I'm guilty of it (although I try not to let it go months.) One blog I follow hasn't been updated since October. I don't know if the author is blogging somewhere else, or has just stopped. There's no 'I've Moved! Come find me here!' post. There's no final, calling-it-quits post. It's just gone... dark.

There are a few agent blogs I used to devour, but don't any longer because they are mostly rehashes of old posts. I get that there's only so much to say about queries and what makes an agent ask for a partial or a full or offer representation. There really are only so many ways to reword those posts as well. Some of those agents are no longer agenting. Some, like Bookends, have decided that they've said all they could say and are no longer going to be doing regular blogging--although they may still post sporadically. Some pull the plug altogether, like Miss Snark did a few years ago. I'm still kind of sad about that one, actually. I loved Miss Snark. Hard to believe it's been five years since it went dark.

Most of the writers I know, including me, have other lives away from the computer. And those other lives can keep us crazy busy for weeks at a time. Or maybe it's just that there is only so much to say. How many times can you blog about how much your characters seem to hate you, or how much you hate waiting on a sub because the time goes so slowly, or how you understand no-response-means-no-but-it's-still-a-sucky-policy?

So I wonder if blogging is slowly starting to go the way of MySpace. Has everything that can be blogged about, been blogged about? Or is it just that, with the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, things that used to be updated in blogs are done via those mediums instead?

I've wavered back and forth between letting my blog go dark. Sometimes, it's just one more thing I have to do. But other times, I think, I still enjoy it (when I can think of an original topic to rattle on about), so why stop it? I know I'm not nearly as good at keeping up with it as I used to be, but I try not to let too much time pass between posts.

So what do you think? Has blogging seen its heyday? Or is there still anything interesting left to blog about?

2 comments:

Maria Zannini said...

I hardly think so. I've got nearly 1000 blogs on my reader. I lost a few 'writer' blogs in the last few months but that's to be expected. They give up or move on to something else. No point in blogging if you've got nothing to say.

I get the majority of my information from blogs. They're a great resource.

Kim said...

Guess I need to find different blogs, then. Mine all seem to be going silent, one by one. :D