What is wrong with blogging?

It's hard to pontificate to an empty room, and by god I've tried over the years.

Like most people, this isn't my first blog. First of all, there was that 'look at me I'm a teenager who's well-informed' blog which never took off and then there was the 'obnoxious ranting which is hardly insightful or revolutionary' blog, and there's this blog.

I don't particularly know why posting to this blog has become so difficult for me. After all, I'm hoping to become a somewhat profesional writer, so I should be chomping at the bit at the sight of this balnk piece of paper in which to exercise my trade and put forward my humble opinions.

Yet here I am, posting sporadically and almost forgetting this blog has an existence. I really don't want to go down the road of blaming the readership for my lack of activity, but it's hard to keep up the rage when nobody's looking. It's like trying to give a dog your dinner order; you can try all you want but at the end of the day you won't get through to the mutt and you're left hungry (Quite possibly the most derogatory similie I've ever used).

This sporadic posting has also coincided with me getting a new job to support my job hunt, which mainly involves pointing in the general direction of Twilight and putting on my nice face (which I'm sure is absolutely horrendous). When I get home after the day, I'm not exactly inclined to sit down and produce my own content. I'm just way too busy catching up on the content that I've missed during the day.

Are these the reasons why amateur blogging is on the decrease while pro bloggers are starting to dominate *cringe* 'the blogosphere'?

To look at the decline of the casual blogger, you must first catagorise the type of blogs they keep. For the sake of my argument, I'm putting forward two types of bloggers. Numero uno, the 'I have a cat and the cat's name is Mitsy'-blogger and the 'I'm a citizen journo, worship me?!'-journo.

If we suppose these types of blogs are responsible for a fair chunk of content produced by private producers, then it's easy to see why over the past year or so less people have been inclined to tell the world about the minutae of their daily lives.

In the first instance, if people really wish to tell people about their cat Mitsy and what she had for breakfast, they have other avenues for doing so now. As people become more savvy, web 2.0 has started to take over and alternate sources for information are getting out there. We now have Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites to share personal updates with the world and we also have free media-sharing sites such as Flickr and Photobucket to share photos of said Mitsy. Of course, there are many other alternate avenues, these are just examples and these have been around for quite a while. They've become entrenched in the mindset of the internet user to the point where blogging has become quite irrelevant.

So for the first type of blogger, the blogger still exists and the yearning for sharing is still there, but they've just moved on to the latest and shiniest thing to share their ideas.

The second kind of blogger which has been providing news content and discussion has be co-opted by old media trying to stay with it. As much as people love the rantings of Bob from Wagga on the subject of an effective ETS strategy, they love the same thing from 'media types' who present their views with better prose.

Professional blogging again, has been around for quite a while and this isn't a 'Who? What? Pro blogging is an emerging news outlet?'-kind of post, but stay with me here. Those sage old men in their ivory towers saw the trend toward a more personal and forthright new service and they got people who were blogging anyhow into the office to blog for them for very little scratch. Now you have the same kind of content, just under a new banner. I'm talking about sites such as the Huffington Post and The Punch for those of you up there and down here respectively.

More and more bloggers are being co-opted by the machine, and the machine is flooding the space with their own journo graduates and publicity-seeking journos woking for scale, so what room is left for the niche blogger?

Why would I want to read about Bob's take on the ETS when I could do the same thing by going to a trusted source?

So one type of content generator has moved away from the sphere and the other is being (if not already) swallowed up by traditional media yelling "The internet!? BY GOD IT'LL KILL US ALL!" Of course, this is old news and I knew this from the start, so why in the hell did I decide to blog in the first place?

I find that answer, and I may start blogging with a fair degree of regularity.

'Till Next Time