blogging the drama

I hate starting sentences/paragraphs/essays with the phrase “The problem with…. is….”, more than I hate starting anything with “I hate…”, but, the problem with blogs/blogging is that each post has the life span of about three days in terms of its perceived relevance. Well, my perception of its perceived relevance at least.

I am under pressure to write this. It has been a month since my last post and already my blog is showing the signs of an author with less content than he had originally made out. This blog began with the intention of being an experiment into how long my attention would be held by this medium. The virtue of the blog is that it gives a person like me the forum to voice my bias and jaded opinions to my minions. The blog provides the illusion of publishing. That I can capture my thoughts (yes, my very own) and blog them out into the webosphere to be read by the many folk who take interest in my challenging and confronting opinions, take pity on my miguidedness or actually give a shit about my life. Admittedly, when I began I was suspicious that no-one would read this. I had recently read that a new blog was created every second and this was going to be my test to see if the blog world was just a whole lot of publishing going on with very little reading going on.

Three months and one week into App OD and I couldn’t be further from the truth. I have five followers (all close friends). I have received a total of zero comments and an equal zero correspondence through my blog. It’s been marvellous really. In fact my life has changed dramatically. And here I am stretching it to come up with a subject as I can feel the deadline for a new post breathing down my neck. Before App OD becomes just another school project, just another wedding blog or holiday blog, where the enthusiasm for writing the blog dies with the expiration of the event, I am struggling to engage my audience, now desperate for my next post, so accustomed to more regular bloggers they are.

But, back to the problem with blogs. Who is responsible for this fleeting relevance? Why do I feel this need to punch out another post, quickly? Is it teenagers, with their short attention span? I think that young web loggers may be partly to blame but not entirely. I think excessive blogging is more to blame. Some people blog once a day or even more. Usually, I find these blogs annoying. I also think writing which is overly diarisitic is a problem. I am usually uninterested by blogs that are fairly raw unedited accounts of the blogger’s current state. If you want to update your status, use Facebook or Twitter.

But this is not a rant about how to or how not to write a blog. What the fuck would I know right? Having been only in this game since June 2010. I am questioning the longevity of blogs and the perceived relevance of specific posts and how quickly that relevance declines with time. There we are: subject. Blogs may be used as source material for essays and papers. Therefore, the URL of said blog should appear in the references of these essays and papers. So long as the blog stays active online, these sources remain to be investigated by anyone seeking out more information or confirmation of source material. In turn, the reputation of the author of these sources is determined by the nature of their particular blog. The blog of a large real estate firm may seem more credible and therefore more stable and in turn possibly able to maintain a greater longevity than a personal blog such as this one.

Assume, for one horrible second, that I stop writing, but don’t take this blog down. Assume that Blogspot never goes bankrupt or dies or whatever, and assume that some poor soul at some point has quoted me in their PhD/Year 12 essay. Further, assume that some cheeky wannabe detective decides to look up this Apparent Overdose blog years down the track, years after my last post (coming up in October when I really have exhausted this stupid idea): The blog will still be here. Apparent Overdose will look as it was last left, with its content more or less relevant depending. But it can be verified, read and even liked.

Assume now that the aforementioned real estate firm enters financial difficulty and closes, thus deconstructing and removing its website and blog. And similarly assume that someone has quoted something from that blog in their paper and some dorky cunt has decided to investigate the real estate firm only to find server cannot find requested URL. Does this make the real estate firm or me less credible? Which blog is more relevant? Who cares?

Ok, so there are a load of other things to consider in terms of measuring credibility. But is this blog more relevant simply because it still exists, if only because I was too lazy to remove it? No. Do the posts hold any relevance one year, five years or twenty years later? Yes. They are historical documents in the same way that sketchbooks, magazines and essays are. If a blog’s author becomes famous, their teenage school art project blog suddenly becomes a valuable insight into the apparent genius of a new star basking in their fifteen minutes. I am overstating the relativity here and nominating a vacuous example. Perhaps I could have said historians will value the fickle blogs of fools like myself as documents of ages past. Myself, unlikely to bask in that fifteen minutes, will unlikely have my blog drooled over by fans. But does that make my content less important? No. Importance of content is relevant to audience, but also to audience size. My audience (of five followers and at least two other known readers) is much smaller than say Miley Cyrus’, but my content by comparison may be far more relevant to my audience. I am guessing here, I don’t even know who Miley Cyrus is or even if she has a blog... [Googles Miley Cyrus… ].

I need to record the rants I make in the wee hours and re-blog them, this is often when I am most passionate, lucid and uninhibited. App OD is rant. My not so humble opinion. Written to endure for days, weeks even, it’s relevance relative to my closely related audience. I have plenty more to say, trust me…