Don’t Call it A Comeback, I’ve Been Here For Years

From The Blogging Cycle – Back To The Beginning (found via another good take on the subject, Are Personal Blogs Making A Comeback?):

I’ve noticed an interesting shift in blogging. In short, there’s a trend moving away from hyper-focused niche blogs, back to what I’d call “personality” blogs. It makes me think of when I started writing online in 2000, and I like it.

As someone who also started writing online in 2000, I have often wondered, in observing the massive changes to the blogosphere over the years, whether I should jettison this blog and start a new one which focuses on just one of my various interests (and doesn’t do weird non-SEOptimized things like quoting LL Cool J for its post titles). As pitiful as it sounds to say this about something that’s been a part of my life for the past 12 years, the days when it had many regular readers and active commenters seem long past and I have a feeling hardly anyone would notice its disappearance. But each time I consider the idea seriously, something in me can neither bear to abandon something that I’ve truly loved creating, nor change its essential premise.

I unfortunately doubt the purported comeback of the personal blog will do very much for the fortunes of this particular personal blog, unless there just happen to be hordes of people roving the Internet in search of that one other person who also loves Sonic Youth, roasted chickpeas, lindy hop and tiny zoological museums containing walrus penis bones (just taking a cross-section of the most recent 2 pages of content). But it is nice to know I am not alone in my attachment to the idea of a blog which is simply intended to reflect the personality of its writer, without simultaneously attempting to shoehorn that personality into a “personal brand” for monetization.