Re-entry
I have had a blog for about five years. I remember reading a friends blog and thinking how cool it was, so I had a go. Five years later and I’ve used a number of different services and posted a load of stuff; I’ve made some people laugh, offended some people and asked difficult questions.
Almost a year ago I moved my blog over to Tumblr. Tumblr isn’t really about writing, it’s more about sharing cool stuff that you find online. At the time I was very disillusioned with the point of a blog. Basically, no one was reading mine. And, in the information world we live in, if no one reads your blog then it becomes void.
Lets face it, the main reason we blog is for others to read it. If they don’t read it, we don’t blog; There is no point.
So I moved to Tumblr and have enjoyed the fast pace and ease of posting something I find online thanks to it’s handy bookmarklet. I also found that more people were visiting the site.
However, after a few conversations, I found that people wanted some of the old style blogging back. They liked that I’d ask questions and they enjoyed reading the deeper, usually theological posts.
Around the same time as this conversation I had added Google Analytics to the template of my site. It’s a bit of code that tracks how many people have visited the site, how long they stayed, what the most popular page is and a whole host of other information. It also tracks what country and city someone has visited your site from (someone from Mexico City has visited SteveHeyes.co.uk That is quite cool).
After looking at the reports it became apparent that more people than I thought where reading my blog. I though about 10/20 people read it. Tops. But according to Google Analytics, I was getting over 700 visits a month, 243 of which where ‘absolute unique’.
Also I started to read Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. I may write a more detailed review, but in essence it talks about being masters of technologies and not slaves to them. It also pointed out that media, and technology in general, are always extensions or amplifications of human capacity (The wheel extends walking, the telephone extends speaking, Facebook extends ‘community’)
So this got me thinking. Why did I blog? What is the point of it? If my view was ‘value-only-if-read’ towards my posts then was there any point if no one read them? Was this view and the apparent value of my posts having any effect on me? However, I did miss blogging; asking questions about faith, life, God and how it all fits together.
I battled with myself for a few weeks. I didn’t want to add to the information overload that we already face. I also didn’t want to be really pretentious, thinking that I have all the right answers (or even all the right questions). But, in the end, I wanted to write again.
So I am going to start it back up but I am going to do it a bit different. This time I know that people will be at least visiting the site, and I have added Analytics again to track that. However, I am going to attempt to move away from a ‘value-if-read’ philosophy and move towards an extension and amplification of human capacity, in this case; my thoughts, ideas and questions.
It is also separate from SteveHeyes.co.uk as that still serves it’s function of sharing stuff I find. I’m just testing what happens as I write, ask questions and join in with discussions and conversations. You could call this blog an experiment. But let’s not get carried away here, it’s just one guys thoughts.
I’d say feel free to join in, but really I don’t need to. This is the internet. You can do what you want. I’m going to do this.
