Lifecycle of Bloggers - 2008 Update
Clearly, 3 years since, this post is overdue for a refresh. So here goes.
Lifecycle of Bloggers
Having blogged in one form or fashion for the last 6 9 years or so (not including personal journals that I’ve written in, on paper even, with crayon even, since I was six years old), allow me to personally provide you with a rundown on the lifecycle that I’ve observed from personal bloggers.
1. Start reading blogs.
You start out as a lurker and by either having met a blogger or run across an intriguing and challenging post from someone else’s blog, you start mulling about in your head for either a forum for response, challenge, or agreement. And at this point, you’re really F*ing tired of hearing what they’re talking about on the Daily Show, or in the NYTimes for “Latest cool authors” with blog turned book deals or author turned blogger deals or winding up Dancing with the Stars.
You *could* start by commenting on other folks blogs first, but you start having a gradually increased desire for a space of your own.
Like when you’re living in your parent’s basement and the rest of your friends are making weekly trips to Home Depot and using words like “mulching”. You begin to wonder if you want to belong.
At this point, if you haven’t started or killed a blog off 3 times in a row by now, you’ve finally returned to human society after having been a)abducted by aliens, b)escaped from a macrobiotic polygamous cult, or c)been released from GITMO. Regardless, you acknowledge that you are overdue and scramble to find something to blog about.
Surely if everyone else is able to be so gawd-damn-interesting then surely you must too.
2. You start a blog.
Maybe at first it’s on blogspot or livejournal. You start writing about cheese sandwiches. Or you repost Lolcats.
You use your full name and the full names of your friends that are involved in your occasionally mischievous exploits. These things satisfy you. Hubris starts taking a more significant part of your site as you develop your tiny homestead online. The notion of fleshing out your online personality becomes important.
You consider your blog brand to be a potential asset in all your future professional/personal ventures and wonder if maybe you can find fame and fortune as a professional blogger expert in something. The idea of registering http://www.iamsmarterthanyouintheobscureorsemimadeupsubjectofdutchamishbehavioralpsychologyandbrandbuilding.com comes across your dreams more than once.
3. You become a stats whore and widgets junkie.
Daily stats/referrals and meme participation for webrings, quizlists, personality profiles, and the occasional sepia toned webcam photo to make you look all “emo” and “sultry” and “sensitive” or at least a little bit thinner. And definitely like a Kpop music video still image.
You voraciously groom your links list as you build a posse. The wishlist makes it’s initial appearance and creepy strangers start sending you gifts when your birthday comes around. You consider this slightly weird, but hey, then again, you *did* get that Star Wars Box set that you always wanted. You *start* memes just for the additional traffic. Perhaps you even start a webgame of sorts.
You actively seek out the latest/greatest widget or adjunct blog identity addons for your blog. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk.
A Digg & Delicious link aggregator. A Friend feed publisher. Linked In. Plaxo. An Oath/OpenID broadly distributed commenting and community something or other and some other uberbeta pretty frosty pastel application blog widget addon thingie thing that breaks only every other day and leaves a gaping gash of error messages across areas of your blog.
Of course you wind up blogging about your technical challenges and why this ap or that sucks and fails you and whine about your experience across every social network tool and website including Get Satisfaction. This of course doesn’t mean that you actually ever contacted customer support directly with an email. EVAR.
4. You become really personal on your site as the online and real-life worlds start confusing you.
As you recognize the possibility of being an opinion leader in your personal circle, people flame you. You occasionally flame back. You cry about comments that certain people make to provoke you. You bitch about these things as well. Then you take into consideration that comments were made by pimply 14 year olds who post jpegs of their warcraft characters online and realize that these lOZeRs aren’t worth your time. This gives you an sense of superiority. Haha! you say to yourself. I have a posse and a blog and you don’t. So fuck off, you lame twat. Hazzah!
It becomes really clear that you can punish ex’es either professionally or personally for your blog.
That jackass that borrowed your red swingline stapler at your office is so going to get a fucking pixel-full with the rant that you feel absolutely justified in posting on your site. Or worse, some really offensive mashup. (Of course complying where possible with Creative Commons)
And that person who sold their competing blog to AOL on Welsh cognitive behavior and social media marketing is your new blog nemesis. Bastard. That should have been you.
You make yourself stalkable with public location-based gizmos like Upcoming.org, Plazes, and Brightkite. Because, oh yeah, the IRL space for connecting with other digital people is so desperately appealing.
Honestly, no one cares that you’ve geo-tagged that photo of your epic toilet and published in on Flickr but you do.
5. You faux “retire” from blogging.
Having temporarily exhausted the emotional reservoir from which your personal blog has sprung forth, you post about retiring. Or a vacation. Or a hiatus. Or a sabbatical. You say this will be permanent. Or last a month.
You divert all your attention instead to managing your other distributed online identity homesteads. Your Facebook profile gets updated, you post video entries on the latest video ap flavor of the month. And you still go to blog-related meet-ups.
With enough personal resolve, you even revisit your Reunion.com and Classmates.com profiles to see who those 32 former classmates are that are looking you up. And then realize these are the same folks you’ve avoided accepted reconnection requests from on Facebook. Twice.
6. You cave back into blogging in less than 72 hours.
You candy pants blogging crack addict.
7. You decide to “get serious” about blogging.
You seek out “The A-List” of bloggers and start reading more of them, and news about them, and news about blogging in general. You come to the conclusion that if you ever hope to join their rank, then you need to at least register your own domain. After all, http://candypantsnewbiebloggeraboutcheesesandwhiches.blogspot.com will not get you linked by Kottke.
GoDaddy makes a mint off of you as you register an endless possibility of derivative blog urls and spellings.
http://www.dutchamishandyou.com
http://www.behavioralamishmarketing.com
http://www.brandbuildingamongthosewhoeschewbuttons.com
http://www.youthinkbeingamishiwouldnthaveawebsite-fooledyou.com
http://brandbuildingamongthebehavioraltippingpointofwtf.com
http://socialmarketingandwhythatwelshguysucks.com
Clearly, after having read so many blog posts and rap videos on successful SEO, you have done your work well.
8. You have a pseudo flirty im/blogging/flickr/facebook flirting relationship with another blogger whom you have never met.
This will likely end badly. Very badly.
And will be all over the twitterverse and blogosphere. You receive and obscene number of consolatory messages from friends the moment that your Facebook status changes.
Lolz Sorry.
It *almost* but not quite makes you want to attempt to update your Myspace profile.
You’re already in pain. Why hurt yourself even further with that projecct.
9. You decide that you must meet other bloggers.
SXSW seems like a good way to go about it.
Or at any of the “inserttheweb2.0buzzwordofthenanosecond”-Camps that are in your local city.
Or finding any excuse possible to move to San Francisco. At least a trip, after all. With a visit to SF, meeting other “celebrity” bloggers is just as tasty a tourist destination as going to Fisherman’s Wharf. Or more so. Definitely more so. Your blogroll grows threefold.
10. You take a step back and metablog about blogging and what blogging has done about your blogging.
You become pedantically navelgazingly annoying. For some reason, your blogger readership eats this shit up. This does not convince you, however, that you want to do something silly like smoke weed with Marc Canter. Or have sex with Nick Douglas. Because even *you* know that’s a bad idea.
11. See step 5.
Shampoo, rinse, repeat.
12. You decide that as a result of step 10 and having repeated step 5 more than 3 times in the course of your lifecycle as a blogger, that you need to sanitize or reinvent your blog.
You purge or hide archive entries and take more note to remove full names of your friends/crushes/accidentaldrunkenfondels from your site and links list. Your blog goes back to cheese sandwiches. But this time your site validates. You even have your XFN and Microformats cleaned up.
You still weep a little because Google still finds everything. EVERYTHING. This makes you want to use Yahoo for searches a little more often, but even you realize that’s pretty stupid.
13. You either lose your job because of blogging, are afraid of losing your job for blogging, or join a company that builds blogging too
Either way, your blog either dies a horrible painful death, or becomes significantly less personal to the degree of trite and uninteresting compartmentalization or subject matter discretion.
OR you date a high profile blogger and feel paranoid that the personal or professional fans of that high-profile blogger will leach into finding some reason to hate you. You’ve seen “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and frankly you have no talent for puppets or piano.
OR you find it slightly awkward that your previous manifestos on wrestling in canola oil are being found and read by your inlaws.
OR you twitter so regularly about cheese sandwhiches that it feels enough like blogging that you’ve gotten over your desire to blog.
OR you get a book deal.
Fuck you, welshy social media expert.
14. You decide to start an anonymous livejournal blog.
Here is where you still talk about your crushes, the he said/she said crap, and that you really really really really really really really like Kanye West. You could totally write an awesome blog post about it. Or a video. Or a Podcast. Or a twitter. Oh wait, someone else already did.
many greets from germany!
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