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You Swore That You Never Would Leave Me, Baby
What Ever Happened To You?
I'm an avid checker of blogs. Spending a couple of minutes here-and-there throughout the day to peek in on the online musing of friends, acquaintances, random strangers is a good way to take a short mental break from whatever I happen to be engaged in at the time, and makes me feel connected to them in a very immediate way.
Still, I've noticed a definite downward trend, something to which I myself have recently succombed, namely, a decided lack of things to write about, resulting in decreased frequency of posting. Clearly for a lot of people I know (and I don't think it's an unsafe assumption to posit this as a general trend), blogging has lost its enticement. Understandable. Most people have difficulty maintaining even private journals, where mundane activities can at least become fodder for fantastical musings. Few of us are willing to commit to that level of day-dreaming in something we know others will read. So, after a while, the gild comes off the lily as it were, and people just fall out of the habit. Then, next thing you know, you've forgotten to renew the registration for the DNS, or you can't remember your Blogger password, or any of a number of other obsticles get thrown up in your path, and you just say, "eh, it's not that important anyway."
Which is kind of sad in a way, knowing there are all these mega-trillions of bits-and-bytes representing moments in people's lives suddenly and irretreivably orphaned out there in the cyber-ether, never to be seen again, except perhaps by future generations of Internet archeologists.
I keep a list of favorite abandoned sites (see "Lost At Sea" listings way down on the left margin), and check in every now-and-then, just to see if anybody has renewed their enthusiasm for online journaling. Occasionally, I'm surprised to see a fairly recent entry. Mostly though, it's just a blank page or worse, the dreaded "Page Not Found" redirect, indicating the owner has pretty much abandoned any prospects for reviving the site. On very rare occasions, the owner may have simply switched to a new, different means of blogging (many of my friends have been briefly seduced by MySpace, although I note even that already has its fair share of neglected pages).
Still, I hope all those rants, ramblings, reviews and recollections don't disappear completely and forever. I think it would be fascinating both for writers and readers to be able to re-access those sites at some future date, to reacquaint oneself with that previous version, like going back and looking at old high school yearbooks; pull out that snapshot of the person you once were to see how different you've become (or not) in the interim.
Just so you know, there'll always be a little memorial open here to keep those forgotten spaces as accessible as I can, in case you decide to come back someday.
Posted byCOMTE
on 12:39 PM
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