The blog is dead! Long live the blog!

In case you haven't noticed, I've mostly quit blogging. And I'm only blogging right now because I handed out my business card at a conference this weekend and noticed I still had my blog address on it. (For those checking it out because of the card, Welcome!)

I don't think I'm the only one lately to neglect her blog. Blogs are so last year (or two years ago). What are we doing/reading instead? Posting pictures of food on Instagram,  tweeting 140 characters, writing quips on our Facebook pages: more succinct and visual forms of communication. When I'm online, I am so used to scrolling through tweets and pictures and posts now that it's hard to linger on a page with more than one paragraph. (She said in paragraph two).

And we're (OK, I'm) binge watching TV in my spare time. There is so much good TV right now that it's hard to turn it off for even one night. Last week I finished watching "Victoria" on my PBS App. That's the wrong form of the verb--I didn't "finish watching," I "watched" all eight episodes of Victoria in one week. I watched it when I sat down in the recliner after a long day of work and chores. I watched it while I ate lunch alone on a break from at-home work. I like being swept up in historic dramas--the set design, the beautiful costumes and actors, the gorgeous scenery, all contributing to a feeling of resonant immersiveness. And now I'm watching "The Crown" on Netflix, worth watching for no other reason than to see what the $5 million spent per episode bought (e.g., setting up a state dinner party with what looked like 100 place settings of china and silver, and an orgy of flower centerpieces).

As the day get warmer and the yard/garden calls, I will be pulling myself away from electronic forms of communication and entertainment in the next few weeks--but I'm not sure where this will leave this blog. Is it an electronic form of communication, as well?

Should I stay or should I go?

There comes a time in every blog's life where the blogger has to decide whether to keep it going or to abandon it.

Or, in my case, to not make any decision but to simply neglect it, thinking I'll get to it tomorrow.

I was surprised when I realized that my last post here was made in April. I had written a few posts in my head since then, but they somehow didn't get magically transferred to the screen.

The truth is, these days, I'd rather spend my free time taking photographs or working on stories for publication. Or, I have to admit, writing quippy posts on Facebook--a lot of the pull away from blogging, for me, has been the instant gratification offered there. I like being liked (and liked almost instantly), whereas, I rarely get feedback or reaction to a blog post--all I can see are the number of pageviews going up. (Facebook is its own kind of crack for people who, like most writers, crave attention. But that's another topic...)

So, should I stay or should I go?

My biggest worry in abandoning this blog is that Google will delete it, as they have with other artsy blogs (for an example, see Why Did Google Erase Dennis Cooper's Beloved.... ) Of course, I could revive anything worth saving into new essays, but I'd mourn the loss of the Interviews with Creative People feature, especially since some of the writers/artists have linked to those interviews.

It's so easy to write a few funny or even philosophical sentences on Facebook and not sweat over it. Or to share photographs there or on Google Photos.

Maybe that's the answer. To loosen this site up a little, making it not always a posit for "essays and meditations on writing, creativity, reading, books and art" (as originally stated) but also a place to share other modes of creativity, including visuals. Perhaps I also might actually talk about my personal life/experience without the sepia-toned filter of being a "writer/creative person."

I'll try this approach in the next few posts and see if this makes it more fun...

---------
An example of one thing I like doing these days: using apps to transform photographs. Above is a screenshot of the official Clash video for "Should I Stay or Should I Go," transformed by the Prisma App. 

The empty streets of Blogville

When iGoogle went away, I lost track of the personal blogs I used to read on a regular basis. (It  was easy to see which blogs had been updated with iGoogle because snippets of their recent posts appeared on my front/search page in Chrome). I didn't easily find another way to keep up with them. But the other day, through with my medical treatments and with more time on my hands, I decided to look up the blogs I once followed. I was disappointed to realize that, without fail, nearly all had made their last posts two years ago.

"Where have all the bloggers gone?" several articles have already asked (just type that phrase or "the demise of blogs" into Google and you'll see what I'm talking about). Writer Mel Campbell, in her article, Should we mourn the end of blogs?, aptly said, "The blogroll in my sidebar reads like an honour roll of war dead."

It's assumed that many bloggers have migrated to Instagram and Twitter. In my case, it's Facebook, where I have a ready and responsive audience. The truth is that it's more affirming (and easier) to write a quip on Facebook and get 50 likes than it is to write a blog post that no one comments on.

And yet I'm still blogging. Sometimes it's the only time I write down what I am thinking at the moment. The posts are Instagram for my brain.

To randomly delve into the blogger universe, I've been hitting hit the "Next Blog" tab (at the top left of this page) and have discovered that, while many once-hopeful storefronts on Blogville have been abandoned, the craft stores, decorating shops and seamier establishments still persist. A typical tour goes something like this: Quilting blog, Quilting blog, dead blog (i.e., no post since 2013), Bad Poetry, dead blog, Erotica, Cheap Chic blog, dead blog, etc.

[Blogger help says that "Next Blog" is supposed to take you "to a recently-updated Blogger blog similar to the one you're currently viewing." But each time I've tried it in the last week, I've gotten much different results. One day it was entirely erotica sites; the next day, mostly quilting. A day later, blogs written only in Afrikaans.]

I've also found several "books I am reading"-type blogs, but I imagine that many of the people who had sites like this are moving or have already moved to Goodreads where their reviews are searchable and probably seen by a wider audience.

The blogs I once followed that have disappeared were written mostly by busy adults. Short of an unseen catastrophe in 2013, I imagine what happened is that they kept at blogging for a while and then got busy with work or with family events. Or perhaps they had said all they wanted to say--especially in a venue that offered no financial or other reward.

I, too, may close this Blogville venue in the future. It's not that I've said all that I want to say, but that, perhaps, I'm trying to say too many things. The blogs that have succeeded or, at least, have persisted are those with a specific kind of focus. Someone asked me to describe my blog the other day and I realized I didn't have an elevator pitch to describe it. "It's about creativity," I vaguely said. And then I tried to explain how I have written about art and books and have also interviewed creative people.

It would be so much easier to say, "It's about shoes" or "It's about vegetarian cooking." (There are lots of these blogs around) "Writing Home" might be a better name for a blog that shares letters people have written home over the centuries. Or in which I write about home and what home means. As a "home for my writing," it looks like I am trying to fill every room and bookshelf. Walking in, one might not know where to go or how to get there. Or one might just walk on by, on to a blog that offers updates on Bruce Jenner or a good dinner recipe.

Why blog? (The unintentional and ongoing hiatus)

Why blog? This is a question I've asked myself recently whenever I guiltily remember that I still have one.

It's certainly not for fame or even the paltriest amounts of money—unless you're lucky and you somehow strike a chord with the public. You write about celebrities or celebrity neckties or the minutiae of parenting or... whatever I'm basically not interested in reading or writing about.

The great thing about having a blog is that it provides an instant forum.Whether anyone else cares about it or not, you can translate a thought into a short essay in a few moments' time and send it out to the Internet universe. There is still something powerful and mystifying and exciting about that for me.

But I, obviously, haven't taken advantage of that lately. I've been busy with multiple part-time jobs—not so busy that I don't have a few moments at the end of the day to collect my thoughts, but busy enough that there is not much to collect at day's end.

I understand now why middle-aged people seemed so boring to me when I was younger. There is a certain worn-out/worn-down quality to this time in life that I haven't entirely escaped. When I was in college, I thought I would always ponder poetry, wonder about the meaning of life in all its quotidian fragments. But, instead, these days I seem to ponder how I will pay the next credit card bill, how many more emails I need to answer, all the things I need to do that never seem to get completely done.

Busy-busy-busy and boring-boring-boring.

So, what we have here instead is blank space—more than five weeks of it. I don't think the Internet universe has missed me. Yet I have missed whatever this is—this silent listening, this momentary audience.

The blog post of my dreams

I wrote a blog post in my dreams last night. It was so eloquent, so urgent that it might have been reposted and tweeted hundreds of times. When I woke up, I couldn't remember what it said. The momentum to say something was gone, overtaken by the momentum to get things done.

That is how I write mostly these days—in my dreams.

For the first time in my life, writing has become an activity of my past. I no longer identify myself to myself as a writer. I am not so busy that I couldn't manage to sit down for 10 minutes a day and write something in a notebook, but there are two problems with that: when I get those 10 minutes, I usually waste them complaining I only have 10 minutes to write; and, after spending my working hours on the computer, I don't relish spending any more time there or hunched over paper—my neck, shoulders and fingers hurt; and I need to see people, to breathe fresh air, to exercise so I won't be in pain.

So I have sort-of made the choice not to write right now. Still, my dreams are working to draw me back, enticing me with the appearance of cozy rooms with typewriters, of reporters who want to take down my thoughts, of blog posts that need to be written and revealed to a world that didn't know to be waiting for them.

An accidental hiatus

This blog has been on a temporary hiatus as I deal with several projects and money-making responsibilities that have hit me all at once. I don't believe I've ever gone this long without posting—nearly a month—since I began it in 2008.

I say this, fully aware that using the word "hiatus" in a blog post title is usually its death knell. Bloggers promise to come back... and then the blog doesn't get updated ever. Saying you're on hiatus is only slightly worse than posting laments like "No one is reading this blog!" To complain about lack of readership is to kill a blog... to let it go willfully on hiatus can be equivalent to letting it die from neglect.

My primary aim here has always been to find shelter for whatever I was thinking about or finding in any particular moment (and possibly to start the fodder for potential, longer stories and essays). It has been cool to witness the surprising ways that people have found it.

And, yes, I realize that this sounds like I am saying good-bye. But maybe this blog needs a reload.

I certainly need a reload in my own life. I have been editing/writing at home for the last eight or so years, and writing/blogging and gardening in my spare time. I take walks in my neighborhood and often never see anyone else I know or who will speak to me. Not such a great lifestyle for someone as extroverted as I am—nor the source of good material for someone who wants to write fiction. In recent years, my stories have been variations on themes of isolation. An editor who looked at my children's novel asked how my 11-year-old protagonist could feel so alone. Most of my characters recently have been written from long-standing memories—I am not seeing people interact enough in the present to know how or what to write about them.

So I need to get out of the house and go back to work in a larger environment, even if for only a few hours a week (which is what I've been working on for the week). This is as important to me now, and as soul-nourishing, as writing has always been for me.

After my current work surge settles down, I hope to return to these pages refreshed and ready to find new things to talk about.

The absent blogger

My recent absence from this blog coincides with the new "look" that Blogger rolled out for Blogger Dashboard (its blog editor) a few weeks ago. Now I must type my posts into a tiny box on a blank screen (click on pic above to see it better). It feels like I am floating in space, and my words are barely hanging in the ether (which, I suppose, they are). It doesn't seem as compelling an exercise any more. No matter how many words I write, I cannot fill all the blank, uninterested space surrounding the box.

I suppose I can write an essay elsewhere and simply upload it here, but no matter how quickly I accomplish that, I'll still have to confront this white screen. There is something terrifying about such blankness. It is like shouting into the infinite, and hoping some of my words will stick.

It is a visual representation, then, of what writing or any type of creativity really is. Each is, in its own small or big way, is a prayer or courageous wish.

Web directories and resources for creative writing: Yahoo directory

I was excited recently to discover that Yahoo still maintains a Web subject directory (which, ironically, I found via a Google search); even more excited to see that one of its subject categories is Literature > Creative Writing.

[For those of you who don't know Yahoo's history, before Yahoo had devolved into a celebrity news port, its focus was on indexing the Internet—this was before the Internet got so crowded. I heard a Yahoo rep speak at librarian conference in the mid-90s about their subject indexing.]

But I'm not sure that I can trust this directory as being either comprehensive or unbiased. When I looked at the Yahoo sub-listing for Literature > Creative Writing/Blogs, I was puzzled that they list only 25 blogs, and wondered why they'd listed Neil Gaiman's blog first—which meant the list isn't alphabetical, but it didn't say if it was listed by popularity ranking either.

Of course I wanted to help them plump up the list, so I clicked on the top link that says "Suggest a Site"—this links to a page that says:

There are two ways you can submit a site to the Yahoo! Directory.

Standard
Free!
No time guarantee

or

Yahoo! Directory Submit
7- Day Guarantee (If you choose Yahoo! Directory Submit we guarantee that your site will be considered by our editors within 7 business days.)
US$299.00 non-refundable, recurring annual fee

So, writer beware. I'm sharing the link to this listing, but not necessarily endorsing it.

Farewell "real sex"—hello "bleak and depressing"

In a post last February, "On getting free HBO for a month," I described the HBO program "Real Sex" and made the startling conclusion that the people featured on the show don't seem to be well-read intellectuals.

Despite my lack of graphic detail about the show's goings-on, that post became one of my most popular for awhile. I know this because Sitemeter (that little green box at the bottom of the page) lets me see the search terms people have used to get to my blog. And there were a lot of "real sex," "HBO real sex," and "dirty real sex" searches for awhile. The searches were from all over the world (Sitemeter lets you see the countries from which the searches originate), though most were from the United States.

Sitemeter also lets you know how long the reader stays on the page. Not surprisingly, those who were looking for "real sex" but found my blog instead stayed for average of "0 seconds."

I've decided to take off the "Free HBO" essays and polish them for publication elsewhere, but I don't worry that people won't still accidentally find my blog. Recently there's been a rash of searches using terms like "bleak depressing music," which has led readers to my post, What is the most depressing song ever? Fortunately, these readers tend to linger a little longer than those looking for "Real Sex."

The most surprising statistic in this is that every search originating from a European country recently (5 out of the last 100, the maximum Sitemeter tracks) were for "depressing music" or some variant. I hope that once the winter is over and the cold and the fog lifts, such yearnings will go away, even if it means less traffic to my blog.

Postscript: I just realized, by merely mentioning "HBO's Real Sex," I'm going to garner renewed traffic to this blog from people who didn't really want to get here. If you're one of those and you've read this far... oh, wait, you already left 20 seconds ago.

The shorter the better?

I know, I know, bloggers are supposed to keep their posts short—somewhere between a tweet and the length of one computer screen. But some weeks I only get to write these posts and I don't want to condense all I've been thinking about into a couple of paragraphs.

Still, I have to recognize that my most popular posts are also my shortest. I've gotten more comments and messages about the first (and shortest) post I did on depressing songs and on the one that was composed mostly of my daughter's drawing of a dying Washington Post than I have on almost anything else I've written about in the last year.

So, if brevity is what readers really want, this should be my most popular post yet.

Writing Home word cloud

OK, so I'm a little behind, and maybe everyone already knows about this, but I think it's cool—it's a Wordle* representation of the most-used text on this blog (click on the thumbprint to see it enlarged):

* From www.wordle.net/: Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

The new poetry.com for blogs?

I got this strange email today:

This is Shiela from hp-ink-cartridges.org.
We stumbled on your blog while searching for Hp Ink Cartridges related information. We operate the largest hp cartridges website featuring more than 30,000+ blogs. Our site averages 200,000+ uniques visitors per month. As a kind note We have featured your blog at http://hp-ink-cartridges.org/blog_awards/index.php?id=811 We would be grateful if you could add the following details to your blogs main page.
Looking forward for your confirmation.

I don't remember ever mentioning HP Ink Cartridges on this blog—could they know that I have an HP printer? More likely, they are writing this message to any blog they can find on the Web and the gullible blogger, like me, checks out the site. I had a momentary hope that maybe HP had created a blog awards web site and I had been chosen for it, but a quick look at their ".org" site revealed it to be a commercial enterprise selling ink jet cartridges. Perhaps such gullible optimism accounts for their 200,000+ unique visitors a month.

My blog wasn't actually listed on their site although there were plenty of other blogs there already, from the "DIY Poetry Publishing" blog to the "Drugstore Divas" blog: "Life is expensive; toothpaste shouldnt be." I'm supposing Writing Home won't be among them unless I create a link to the HP ink jet.org web site, but that's not going to happen. Here's hoping this post does not give them any additional traffic!

Local is the new word in journalism

This is my first post that is here mostly to offer links to sources on a particular topic. (See previous post for more info).

Although I consider myself a creative writer, I have an ongoing interest in newspapers because I used to (and probably subconsciously still) think of them a backup plan: if I suddenly had to make some money, I could dust off my clips and walk them around to newspaper offices, offering to freelance. You tell me to write about something and I can usually deliver, no matter how little I know about the topic beforehand. It worked twice, in two different states in the 1980s, but I should know better than to think it will work now.

Or maybe there is still work in newspapers—just unpaid or poorly paid, compared to years past. Some recent articles I've run into have discussed the trend toward local news and local blogging.

• Maybe I'm a little behind on this trend, but the first article I saw about the local trend in a major publication (not just as a blogger's fantasy) was the article Peytonplace.com (Newsweek, Oct. 12, 2009), which discusses how citizen journalists/bloggers are stepping in to cover outburb communities abandoned by big-city newspapers. Some of the ventures have been launched by news companies themselves, like the New York Times. The article uses terms like "hyper-local journalism" and "journo-bloggers"—I'm not sure these are new terms of art, or were just made up by the writer.

• Then a few day's later, on Oct. 19th, the Washington Post rolled out a total redesign, along with a print "Redesign Owner's Manual." Two of the manual's eight pages are devoted to the Post's new Local emphasis: one page is about the Post's new "Local Living" section (which rolls in its former, separate Home and county weekly sections, saving paper and print) and the other about "A new local home page." The new Local web page can be set up to be the user's entry way into the rest of the Post, with zip code set-up for weather and a way to format the page to display headlines from your chosen area and areas of interest (e.g., The District, Maryland, Schools, Crime, Obituaries, Religion).

[The irony here is that I looked at the web page, but then had to go back to the print manual in order to figure out how to format the page. It was a lot easier to figure out using the print write-up vs. the bald site itself.]

• The next day, NPR's Diane Rehm Show discussed New Business Models for Journalism. Forty-one minutes into the show, Rehm asks Arianna Huffington what the Huffington Post is doing to "address the local issues." Huffington says that the H. Post has launched Denver, New York, Chicago sections, to offer aggregate local news by making partnerships with local newspapers (linking to their news sites), and by using local bloggers and citizen journalists. (Sounds like unpaid or low paid work to me.)

BTW, the Huffington Post has been looking at the topic of the evolution/death of newspapers for awhile, but can't seem to make up their minds what to call the trend. They offer these categories (some with only one article each):

- The Reconstruction of American Journalism

- Death of Print

- Death of Newspapers

- Newspaper Decline

...etc.

Dare I say it? The H. Post needs to hire a librarian to firm up the categories and make the site more searchable. Perhaps that is where my next I'm-really-desperate-for-money news job is.

Collecting a virtual library for my readers and me

I've been collecting links and articles over the last several months on topics that interest me, particularly those that I keep meaning to write about for the blog. But it occurred to me today that I could just post the links with minimal description, and make them findable under particular categories. For instance, I've bookmarked a few articles recently on the fate of newspapers; rather than try to add my own cry to the crescendoing dirge for newspapers, I'll just put them in a post indexed "newspapers."

To be honest, I'm doing this mostly for my own benefit, so that I can find things later, whether to re-read them more intently or to visit them for the first time. And doing this will help plump up my somewhat anemic "Special Features" section under "Writers Resources" and "Musings on Newspapers."

I still intend to write an essay a week, so this will an occasional supplement to my other postings.

Why I blog

After I published my Popularity post (in which I lamented that stupid videos on YouTube can claim a million viewers in a matter of days while this blog had only had 1,200 hits in a year), a Facebook friend wrote me, saying: "Charles Bukowski wrote an entire poem about how you should only write because you HAVE to - I think that is probably a good enough reason, whether or not anyone else reads or likes it." [I think the poem he referenced is So You Want to Be a Writer.] Perhaps my FB friend was trying to console me, but I found his message a little depressing since Bukowski's poem about writing for the pleasure of writing had obviously been published and was enough-known for someone to reference it.

I knew from the outset that a blog about creativity and writing was not going to garner as many hits as blogs about vacuous celebrities (e.g., TMZ, Perez Hilton, et al). And, to be truthful, I’ve never wanted it to be that popular—if I knew that thousands would read each posting it would probably leave me tongue-tied, frightened of a voracious public appetite.

But since I received his message a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about why I write this blog when I could be doing something else with my time. I've come to realize that the blog serves several purposes for me:

• It’s an electronic journal, of sorts, much like my Facebook status lines.


• If it didn’t exist, I might not write at all, for days at a time. There is an artificial deadline hovering over me each week; if I haven’t published a new post by Friday I start feeling an antsy obligation to put up something new.


• It’s easier for me to justify making time for a blog post than it is for more personal kinds of writing. I would never tell someone that I am going to go and write something in my journal—it’s private and, for some people perhaps, the act of journal writing (rather than mowing one’s lawn or cleaning one’s house, when both obviously need to be done) verges on narcissism or a waste of time. But tell that same person you’re writing for a blog and it seems more concrete, justifiable, with an edge of glamour even. And it’s something I can talk about since it’s public: my blog has a URL (which I sometimes put on my business cards); my journal doesn't.


• It has given me a compilation of essays (or essay embryos) that I otherwise wouldn’t have. There are 80 posts on this blog right now that would not be here if I'd never created the blog. Having to write something every week often gives me a chance to start riffing on whatever is on my mind at a particular time, capturing thoughts that might have evaporated or evolved differently if I hadn’t put them down when I did.


• And, it often gives me a respite from my otherwise overly to-do-listed weeks. I found this entry in my journal today, written late summer, which is what prompted me to write this post today:

"How simple it is for me, then, to sit down for an hour a week and write a blog post, then to take a few moments to look for a photo I might use for it, convert it to sepia, and load it up on Blogger. It is a moment of solace and peace. I wish I could have it for more than an hour a week."

(Photograph by Beth Blevins)

Another one bites the dust

An alternative title for this post might be “And then there was one” because I am shutting down my other, remaining blog, Quotes About Creative Women—at least for the summer.

I started QACW because I wanted a place to hold all the quirky and moving quotes I’d read over the years, from Barbara Kingsolver talking about leaving Kentucky because she was flat-chested to Joni Mitchell talking about her grandmothers. I thought that the blog would be another way to connect with friends, whom I surely thought would want to add quotes of their own, or share their favorite women’s quotes; to sweeten the deal, I promised to link to the web pages of contributors—but, alas, I only got one submission.

I also wanted to experiment with using a blog as a database—most of the women (and the few men) I quoted are listed alphabetically using a subject term that maybe I created myself: “writers—Doe-Jane,” which Blogger indexes alphabetically (if you use commas, as in most standard cataloging, Blogger separates each word as a distinct subject term). Hey, I have an MLS, so I might as well put it to use. I found that I didn’t want to index just by last name when I posted quotes by both Alice Walker and her daughter.

But the main reason I started that other blog (along with what was once my cooking/food blog) was to make money. Yes, ha-ha, I’ve discovered that blogs don’t make money. You’re supposed to get a penny every time someone clicks on a Google ad link in your blog, and then you get a check when you reach your first $10. As you can guess, I never reached it. I also added Amazon-links to the books I quoted (not just to make money, but to promote the wonderful books I was discovering), but I made no sales. [Just for the record, I’ve never tried to make money on Writing Home, so I still have some integrity left.] 

It was fun, at least at first, to go out and find new quotes after my initial batch of quotes was posted. I used Google Books and searched for “women and creativity” and any similar terms I could think of. This led me to authors and books I never would have discovered otherwise, which I purchased or borrowed through interlibrary loan at my local library. Through this effort I first read Yvonne Vera, Susan Minot, and Judith Ortez Cofer, among others.

So, I have no regrets that I started QACW, and I hope someday (maybe in the near future) to start adding new quotes to it again, though it will probably not be on a regular basis since I don’t have easy access to a big library, nor time enough to graze lazily through it.

How are people chosen for Writing Home interviews?

If you’re looking for a theme or commonality among the people I’ve interviewed for this blog so far, it’s pretty simple—they are all people I know or have met at some point in my life. I have been happy to reconnect with writers I’ve known for brief periods in my life, as well as to provide a forum for some of my more creative and prolific friends.

For instance, I was so glad to reconnect with Barry Yeoman again, who was a colleague for a short time when I was a reporter in North Carolina in the mid-1980s. And I’ve known Kim Kupperman nearly continuously since we were the “womyn’s” co-editors at the school newspaper at UC-Santa Cruz.

The other thing about the interviews is that each has provided me with insight into how creative people produce and publish their work. A common thread I’ve noticed among them is that many say that they feel grumpy or blue unless they produce something—that they need to write or paint every day or, at least, on a regular schedule. I feel the same way, which may explain why I’m so crabby during weeks when I’m too busy with paid work or household errands to sit down and write for any significant amount of time.

I have a few more interviewees lined up for the near future. However, it is inevitable that I am going to run out of people I am personally acquainted with who could serve as interview subjects. Of course, I’d like to meet other writers, to widen my circle of writer/artist friends, and hope I will at local writers’ conferences and workshops in the next year or so. But until then, if you’re a writer who reads this blog, or if you’re someone I may have met or corresponded with at some point in the past and you’re up for an interview, free to email me at thebethblevins AT gmail DOT com (do the usual substitutions there).

The other possibility, of course, is that I will simply run out of acquaintances to interview and I’ll just let the interviews fade away—which might be OK, too, since it would be one less thing to keep me from buckling down and writing fiction and non-blog essays (no matter how bad they turn out to be.)

I am Big Brother

Although I vowed in a November post (Blog site counters—or spyware?)  that I wouldn’t use Sitemeter here, not long afterwards I added it to this blog. It’s the little green box at the bottom of the screen.

The information that Sitemeter provides was just too alluring. Among its many features are:

• a world map that shows the location where this blog’s readers were the moment they looked at it;
• which posting(s) they looked at;
• how long they looked at the posting (it’s disappointing to see that many readers only look at this blog for “0 seconds,” although that seems humanly impossible);
• the search terms they used to get to it; and
• the referring web sites that sent them here.

In case you're wondering why you don't see all of these things when you look at Sitemeter, I’ve blocked access to this info to the outside world.

Through Sitemeter’s World Map feature I see that in April alone I’ve had anonymous readers from more than eight countries including Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Indonesia and India. (However, to be perfectly honest, many of the readers from other countries account for the “0 seconds” searches.) This is something I never achieved in my days as the publisher of a very small magazine. I had a few foreign subscribers, but not from such a breadth of countries. However, one might argue that my magazine subscribers really wanted to read the product; it was not something they just happened to click on, or which showed up in a list of search results. They actually paid for it, including the additional cost of international postage.

Sitemeter’s “By Referrals” feature has shown me which web sites have linked to my blog. This is something that cannot be easily found with a Google search, and which other bloggers seem to do quietly on their own. (I’ll list these in a separate post someday since I’d like to acknowledge and thank them).

It’s also through Sitemeter that I’ve discovered that I may never live down the “Beautiful Poem” I wrote on poetry.com—someone searching for “poems on flatulence” found my blog posting about that silly submission.

But Sitemeter gives me a little too much information sometimes. If a friend from Wyoming told me that he or she looks at my blog, I’d know they are lying—the Sitemeter World Map shows no readers from Wyoming. I try not to use Sitemeter to spy on people I know who may have looked at my blog, though sometimes I discover it accidentally.

The too-much-information category would also include details on what kind of computer system the person was using (Mac or Windows), the names of businesses and organizations in whose computers the person typed the search (if they didn't do it at home), and what their Internet provider is. The worst example of this is that I know that in April, someone at a specific YMCA in a specific town in Connecticut searched for “HBO real sex lick it” and wound up looking briefly at my essay, On getting free HBO for a month.

Sitemeter is quietly gathering all this information to use as I wish. I won’t use most of it. All I'm really curious about is how people find this blog. But I wonder, as I said in my previous post, who else might be gathering and looking at such information and for what purposes they might use it.  Perhaps there is a hidden cost to so much free information on the Internet, especially when it's being distributed by sinister or greedy people.

Where will all the newspaper reporters go when the newspapers go away?

Apparently, it seems, to the Web, and to the blogosphere.

Recent news stories have been describing news reporters who have started their own blogs and/or web sites. The articles I’ve read so far have seemed cheerful, hopeful—perhaps the reporters who are writing these pieces want to see blogging as their own backup plan, their next career. Here are some I've read about recently:

• Geoff Dougherty, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, got in on this trend early, in 2005, when he started the Chi-Town Daily News. He left on the Tribune of own accord, before its recent bankruptcy. Dougherty sees Internet publishing as a way to keep local news coverage after (he thinks) the regional newspapers disappear and only a few national dailies will remain. He now has a paid staff as well as volunteers. But, according to a recent Washington Post story, most of the money for his venture so far is coming from foundations and donors.
  


• Former reporters from the recently defunct Rocky Mountain News have started  INDenverTimes, a beta web site that they hope to offer as a full-service news site if they can conjure enough subscribers to keep it going. The site calls itself "A Vision Based on a 150-year tradition." News on the site will continue to be free but its writers' blogs will be available only with a subscription.  According to the web site's FAQ page, subscribers will also have access to "Insight, perspective, live blogging, live chatting, commenting, interactivity with writers and other readers." An interesting model—having readers pay for the blogs, but offering the news for free. Subscriptions are $60/year or three months for $21. That's still cheaper than my print edition of the Washington Post, which is around $30/month, but I don't see how they are going to convince people to pay for something that people have grown to believe should be free.
  


• Some reporters who were let go from the Seattle Post Intelligencer are creating their own web spaces and blogs that feature their fields of expertise. For example, the former food writer and restaurant critic has a blog called Eat All About It; the former children's book reviewer has a blog called Cover to Cover Kids, which currently lists 11 followers.  At the same time, the Intelligencer, which stopped publishing a print edition in March, is Web-only and now features staff and readers' blogs, as well as a prominent column of online advertising.
  

Is there going to be any money in these new kind of online ventures? From my limited experience, no. I haven't made a cent from blogging, despite my insertions of Google ads and Amazon widgets on my other blog (I've resisted putting them here). Readers want to read, not click on ads; or, they're like a friend of mine who is afraid to click on the ads because she worries if she is downloading viruses or making herself vulnerable to future spam mail.

And, who is going to read all these blogs, anyway? (She wrote in a post on her "Writing Home" blog). I am a blogger who rarely reads other blogs myself, since I want to spend my limited free time writing, or reading books or a print newspaper. Where are the readers? Maybe they'll be too busy writing their own blogs, or posting status updates on Facebook. 

It will be interesting to see what is going to happen with print and online media in the next year or so. I can't predict anything, but I have a sinking feeling that there will be more former reporters flooding the blogosphere until we're all sick of blogs and blogging and some, if not many of them, will begin to look for work in other fields.

And then there were two...

The first few weeks of a blog are like a new love affair—you want to spend time with it every day. And then the relationship sets in and the polish of newness starts wearing off. You know the blog isn't a good time investment when it becomes a chore to log into it and keep writing something in it. It's time, then, to drop it, leaving it as another neglected blog-carcass along the Information Superhighway.

So now I abandon my food/cooking blog, Cooking for Four (at least for the time being).

I still like writing about food, but it's difficult to maintain enthusiasm about a blog that has only garnered 159 hits between today and May 9 of this year. And it's been difficult, lately, to find the time to sign into it. Each essay only took, at most, a couple of hours a week from start to finish, including upload and finding an illustration. But a couple hours a week have become precious to me. That two hours might be half a page of a short story or time spent looking for literary markets—or more frequent posts for this blog, which has more of my heart in it.

And, I'll just say it right here, if I'm going to write about cooking, I'd like to get paid for it. I'm tired of "giving away the milk for free," as I protested in a previous post.

Cooking for Four was supposed to be my money-making blog. I put Google Ads on it and an Amazon widget. I tried to gear the writing to a broader audience (everyone eats, not everyone writes), and to write in a chummier style. Then I sat back and waited for the money to roll in.

I've yet to earn a dime. All I've gotten so far are helpful emails from Amazon and Google, suggesting ways to better embed the ads or better sell the merchandise.  (I'm not sure anyone is making money from their blogs; if they are, I'd like to interview them and ask them their secret.)

If there is a publication out there looking for someone to blog about food on your web site, or if you're a magazine editor looking for short, friendly articles on cooking for a family with different food tastes and/or on healthy eating, I hereby announce my availability as of today.