Russell Beattie

Man, I wish I could just sit down and write like I used to on a daily basis.

It feels *different* though... Keeping a weblog seems to have become a sort of a mid 2000's fad that has passed its peak and starting to fade into obscurity, and maybe even soon ridicule along with bell-bottom jeans and mullets. Even though I love putting my thoughts out there, in the back of my mind it's almost embarrassing to add to the cacophony of opinions that now flow daily from every orifice of the Internet from people who just haven't gotten the message that it's just not cool any more. I mean, hey, let's face it - Social Networking elected the current US president, not blogging.

I barely even really *read* blogs any more... I've got a couple hundred subscriptions that update daily and I loathe most of what I skim past. You can't even get real tech news any more... everything I see that seems interesting, needs a day or two of vetting before I believe it. Jobs is having surgery! AOL is selling Bebo! Sony PSP 2 is imminent! Are just some of the completely fictitious news items that I saw repeated over and over again just in the past two days alone. You can't even trust formerly semi-reliable news sources like the AP or WSJ any more, it's just a rumor factory gone amok.

Anyways... I still like to write and rant. But if I'm not going to do it on a regular basis, I'm not sure it's worth doing. I know how to write a "good blog" and that requires consistency and context. Not sure if I'm ready to dedicate myself again to it.

I'm not even sure of the benefits of it any more to tell you the truth. I still get a residual flow of recognition from back when I had 10,000 readers a day which flows into my Facebook account which I now use pretty regularly. People will request to add me as a friend and say, "I've been a long-time reader of your blog." Ok... So I approved you, now what? You and I can see now updates about each other's kids? I don't KNOW you! And you live in some foreign country I'll never visit or vice versa. Some days, I swear, I just want to pull the plug on my server and leave it an Internet Black Hole. Screw personal branding - does it really matter if some guy in East Fuck Knows Where knows your middle name? Not really.

Anyways, I'm just ranting. I guess if I had something worth saying, I'd be more interested in writing about it, but lately I really haven't. I thought maybe if I started blogging just to blog again, I'd come up with something... but that didn't happen either.

-Russ