Tenth Anniversary

Today is the 10th anniversary of revision99.

Road
The road… ahead?

When I started this blog, it was after reading blogs for a few months in the sumer of 2004.  Blogs were actually in the news then. It was a trend. There were already hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions, with more cropping up by the minute. I can’t remember exactly what blogs I was reading then, but I do remember being impressed — amazed, actually — at how many great writers there were out there. I don’t know what made me think there wouldn’t be, and certainly there were (and still are) plenty of bad spellers with nothing much to say and no clever way to say it. But I found a surprising number of smart writers putting together thoughtful, funny, engaging essays, some of them posting every day, and after a while I wanted to join the club.

Blogs have changed a lot since 2004. It’s not a trend any more. Various social networks have gained unbelievable popularity, driven, I believe, by ease of use and privacy controls. On Facebook, you don’t have to know much of anything or figure much out to start creating “updates.” That resulted in a lot of people using Facebook who don’t know much of anything. It’s reflected in their “writing.” Your “friends” don’t have to articulate anything about how much they like the picture you posted of your breakfast burrito. They can just click on “Like.” At first and for quite a while you could only write 240 characters, which relieved the user from having to use language to make sense. Beginnings, middles and ends vanished, along with complete sentences. Pictures, being worth a thousand words, replaced words. And privacy controls ensured that you wouldn’t have to deal with anybody online that you didn’t already know, so there would never be any need to think up and put into words a response to someone who didn’t agree with you. If worse came to worst, you could just “unfriend” them.

The blogs that I still read don’t resemble the blogs that drew me into blogging in the first place. Mostly they are professionally written and they have advertising. In order to target the ads they use tracking cookies and other devices to find out what you might be interested in buying. That way you’ll get more ads about stuff you’ve expressed an interest in. The blogs I read these days, such as Ed Kilgore’s excellent Political Animal, are sort of patterned after old-style newspaper editorial or entertainment pages. But they’re not the heartfelt amateur writing that I once fell in love with, and by amateur I don’t in any way mean inferior. I just mean not written by pros, for money.

So the world’s changed — what else is new? I guess I must sound like an old codger growling at the neighbor kids to get off my lawn. It’s true I miss those early blogs, and the people I met online who wrote them. But nine of the twelve links in my blogroll (look it up, kids) no longer exist, or are abandoned. To fill the empty hours I do have a Facebook account, and a bunch of Facebook “friends.” In fact, I actually feel kind of guilty that I have let this blog languish for such long periods between posts, while I have been busy posting pictures of my breakfast burrito on Facebook. Anyway, I am moving on, in the halting manner of the old codger.

For most of the lifespan of revision99, I was a working man, but that ended more than two years ago. Since then I have sent out over a hundred resumés and did not find work. In the past year my rock’n’roll band fell apart. I am now old enough to receive Social Security benefits, so I applied for that. I scramble daily for little odd jobs that do not tweak my conscience or cause me humiliation. I fix computers, troubleshoot small office networks. I design web sites and write PR. Mostly I sit in the sun and read detective novels.

I don’t know if this blog will continue very far past today. Every now and then I have something to say that I think must be said, and for the reasons mentioned above, Facebook doesn’t always seem like the right place to say it. So maybe I’ll write more here. I am starting  a new solo project, a musical one, and I thought it might be interesting to keep a log of its progress online somewhere. But ten years is a long time for something that’s no longer trendy, and I don’t have blogging friends any more. I don’t write anything of general interest, so I wouldn’t be able to sell ads here even if I wanted to, which I don’t, so what’s the point?

But even if I don’t put revision99 to rest I think I’ll go somewhere else to write about my solo project. Start fresh with a new design. Post my thoughts about the project, describe how it’s going, and put up music clips as I get things finished. So yes, at least one more post on revision99, in which I’ll describe the intent of the new project and maybe include a sound clip and a link to wherever the new project lives.

Until then, happy anniversary to me. I never thought it, or I, would live to this age.

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2 Replies to “Tenth Anniversary”

  1. Yeah, the early days of blogging were great … bloggers wrote comments on other blogs, they did links and it wasn’t difficult finding dozens of creative blogs. Now – there are few comments, few links and not many avenues for discovering quality blogs.

    And, stuff usually has a finite lifespan. Creative writing, art photos, etc. is nearly impossible to frequently blog and then doing so for years is a major challenge. Plateaus are reached, repetitiveness sets and the one doing this probably gets frustrated with derivative efforts.

    I did my original blog for a number of years – and I sort of enjoyed doing it – but it didn’t produce anything in return so I zapped it.

    The current blog is all about a grassroots effort to save a park – and while it gets site visits, I’m uncertain of its effect on the issue. Facebook has changed how people view internet info – clicktavists and slacktavists are way too common.

    Happy Anniversary.

  2. Hey there, Larry Jones. I was reading an old blog post from VikkiTikkiTavi and saw you in the comments and the wormhole lead me here. Happy almost Christmas. Glad to know you’re still out here, too. Life is good. always. SJ

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