Sunday, July 27, 2008
Cleaning up this pigsty. It has been years since I updated my sidebar. Many of the blogs and websites I used to link to are now defunct, or on lengthy hiatus, so I've limited my blogroll to the most regularly updated blogs, plus new discoveries. I still track most of the old ones with RSS, though, on the off-chance the bloggers decide to stage a comeback. I also keep track of many, many other blogs for professional reasons, but as this is my personal blog there is no need to list all those.
Doing this really underscores the way that so many wonderful people I've met through blogging seem to find it exhausting or irrelevant now. Some reasons for this might be:
I might keep tweaking this new list over the next couple of weeks, because there will inevitably be people I forgot to put on it and people I deleted by mistake.
As you can also see, I have added a list of the sites on which I waste so many hours of each day. Wikipedia is probably the worst of them: you begin with a legitimate query and then find yourself browsing lists of famous elephants and researching historical methods of distillation. You also end up being a dreadful knob at parties.
Doing this really underscores the way that so many wonderful people I've met through blogging seem to find it exhausting or irrelevant now. Some reasons for this might be:
- because social media have largely taken over the networking aspects of blogging;
- because the commercialisation of blogging has squeezed the form like a tube of toothpaste, with celebrity bloggers at one end and specialist single-topic bloggers at the other (eg: mp3, gossip, lulz). Generalist blogs about people's everyday musings and antics seem less prevalent now
- because privacy is more of a concern now, and so people have retreated behind password walls into the private public sphere
I might keep tweaking this new list over the next couple of weeks, because there will inevitably be people I forgot to put on it and people I deleted by mistake.
As you can also see, I have added a list of the sites on which I waste so many hours of each day. Wikipedia is probably the worst of them: you begin with a legitimate query and then find yourself browsing lists of famous elephants and researching historical methods of distillation. You also end up being a dreadful knob at parties.
