WATERMARK

I originally published this post in August 02007; this is a rewrite & update. Someone recently searched for it on Watermark, I came in to read it, and realized that much of it suits what I’m experiencing now, in 02026. I am excerpting bits & pieces; if you are interested you should also go to the original post, which has been corrected for broken links.

Lorelle at WordPress published a series of posts recently on Personal Blogging, by guest blogger Edrei Zahari. (You’ll find links to the whole series at the bottom of each post; don’t neglect the comments.) In response, Damien Riley confesses that “Personal blogging has become my fixation,” and points to The Online Diary History Project for some context.

I was pleased to see these, as I think this is a large — and largely overlooked — segment of the blogging community. . .

Except now, in 02026, there may be fewer of us, or those who survived or appeared more recently, are less connected. The community seems to have faded, or moved. To where?

. . . Most of the writing about blogging is aimed at the probloggers — that is, business bloggers (or meta-bloggers) who are blogging for money.

So what of those — we amateurs — who blog for the love of it; who are not dabblers or dilettantes; who work hard to acquire the skills and expertise to write well, and blog well . . . Who blog for fun (not profit); for family and friends and interested strangers; for the joys and pleasures of creating something useful, or entertaining, or beautiful. Or even, goddess willing, all three.

Is there still a market — that is, are there still readers — for this kind of blog? This kind of hard-to-pin, multi-subject, unpredictable kind of blog? Watermark, for example, was long categorized, initially by me and later by others, as a poetry blog. But it was always a weird combination of poems and essays and diary-like entries and silliness and and . . .

We, and our blogs, rest somewhere between the personal diaries and friendship communities where relationships are key for both writers and readers; where content matters because of who creates it, rather than how well it is presented — and those business/ professional blogs that are written consultant to client, or service to consumer, or proselytizer to converts and prospects.

We — those of us in this undefined, middle ground — may not be sure what we are doing, or what we are making; but we are not unprofessional. We are not unskillful.

We just want people who might like us to find us.

How does one do that now? Help people who might like us, find us? So much changed during my break, my silence, pretty much from 02020 through 02025, that I seem to no longer have the skill set required to attract a readership.

Or, perhaps, less kindly, my writing has suffered with time and age and unwelcome changes. The world does not change around me without changing me, too. Perhaps both or neither of these worries are true, and it is simply the state of the world, moving on.

Thus, the dilemma. Let’s see — should I be writing, or marketing? All this whimsy slows loading — that’s bad. How will people know what to expect, when I keep changing the subject? Gosh, my About Page is all wrong. Do I really need to belong to all these social networks to find readers? How many blog directories are there, [and where are they] anyway? What category does Watermark belong in?

02026 presents another huge challenge, Artificial Intelligence and all it implicates regarding writing, creating, blogging, transparency, and so on. I have written several posts on this subject, so will not repeat here, though I will no doubt repeat elsewhere.

And, for transparency, the alternative text for the photo at the top of this page was written by Claude. This is something Claude does much better than I do, maybe because I can see, so I don’t know what is important to those who cannot? As always, all the other writing is my own.

I ended the 02007 post with these questions, which still seem relevant:

Do you blog for the love of it? Because you can’t help yourself?

And if you don’t blog, why don’t you?

[The original post closed with a teddybear icon, which I cannot find again, so … Nellie!]