Newspapers these past couple of weeks have been full of stories about how the blog is dying, people are moving away from them in favour of the joys of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. In which case, why am I bothering to start a new one?
I guess there are two reasons. The first is that the blog isn't really dying. Yes, plenty of people start them and never continue with them. Heck, I've got a blog I started two years ago and then forgot all about. I had other things going wrong at the time and the blog came low down the list of priorities. Then I started the other three blogs and that one completely slipped my mind. But not everyone will be like that. The majority of the blogs cited as 'dead' were never that interesting to start with. Did anyone really want to read the thoughts of Lindsay Lohan anyway? Eventually, they even bored their creators. And it is not coincidence that people have moved to the sites above. In the same way that people nowadays prefer television to reading, writing a blog is just too much like hard work compared to watching or making a video. Basically, if your blog is dying, you probably didn't love the written word that much anyway.
The second reason? Well, about 9 months ago I started a blog called 116 Days and Counting. The intention was to track the progress of my impending wedding, from engagement to divorce. I ha this great idea that, instead of having to keep answering people who asked how things were going, I could just point them in the direction of the blog. What actually happened was that I spent more time defending the blog than I did writing the thing. I somehow managed to produce reading for people who hated what I was writing. Which hopefully is the closest I will ever get to being Jeffrey Archer.
This, on the other hand, is a blog with no purpose, other than to provide somewhere for me to deposit all of the random things that go through my brain. If anyone reads it, that's a bonus. If they like it, double bonus. The important thing is that this blog is going to live.
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