501st post - a look forward

Call this a meta-post if you must, but I'm concerned that blogging is going the way of the 8-track.  Already this blog seems more and more irrelevant in light of facebook and other social media.  Fewer people are reading blogs, it seems, and by far the largest component of my "audience" comes from "views" via image searches -- people are much more interested, it seems, in images than in text.

So why keep blogging?

For a couple of reasons -- I like the chance this blog offers to bring more light to the questions I ask than a simple tweet or facebook post can do, and I like the fact that I can "publish" my thoughts across various platforms with relative ease.  I will miss those aspects of blogging if they ever go away.

I also want to have a record of my thoughts over the past 8-9 years, and I want this blog to serve as a part of that record.  I don't know that digital forms will ever have the permanence of a journal or book, but I like the idea that these thoughts are stored in the cloud somewhere should anyone ever choose to read them.

The problem for anyone who seriously wants to build an audience for his or her blog is the sheer number of competing websites, outlets, and other choices a reader could make -- one in a million sounds like a good percentage when confronted with the fact that there are already over 25 billion page views on just one blogging service in one month, and that doesn't even count the people who choose to read a book, read an e-book, or go on facebook.  Blogging can be frustrating for someone who does it just to get noticed.  I don't think that's the real reason I do this public writing in the first place.

I want to compete in the marketplace of ideas.  I want to build an audience of people who truly care about what I write.  I want to have a voice that stands out from the chaos and makes other people think.  That's part of why I chose the slightly pretentious title for this blog -- I want my blog posts to be meaningful, not just for me, but for other people, too.

But I can't do it in a vacuum.  I need feedback from readers to know what's really worth writing about.  So please, let me know what you think. Check out a few pages on the side when you stumble across this blog.  Leave a comment if a story interests you.  Let me know.  I'm really interested in finding out what my readers want to read about.