Russell Beattie

Hugh had a couple posts recently talking about blogging, and it reminded me that I haven't posted follow up thoughts now that I've been posting regularly for a couple weeks again.

It's actually been great. So nice to have a place to vent again, and to throw random thoughts out there. I really missed it! But what's really nice is there's so much less pressure now that I'm not in the "semi A-lister" crowd like before. It was getting pretty nutty for a while - I was working at Y! and had like 10,000 readers a day... and everything I said was scrutinized as some sort of symbol for something or another. Now it's just another blog again, thank goodness.

The other nice thing is that taking a year and a half off, I don't feel I need to trailblaze anymore - everyone seems to have caught up to where I was a year or so ago. The world has gotten the idea of blogging, and accepted it in general. For a while, a lot of readers really didn't get it. I remember when people would email, very upset if I used the word "fuck" in a post. Others would email if I had a spelling error. Others would complain if I posted about my kid, or how horrible Republicans are (one going so far as to say I'd never work again). When I took down my comments, it caused an uproar that echoed in the blogosphere and in my inbox for weeks, with me being vilified as some sort of fascist dictator. In contrast, several bloggers I've seen recently either launched without comments or took them down, and not a peep was heard.

Mostly, people have finally learned what blogging really is, and that just because you have a semi popular blog, it doesn't mean you're not an idiot or an asshole or have any actual influence in the real world. (For the most part, people still get nuts about TechCrunch, which ranks highly both on the web and on the ignorant dickhead scale.) Also, people have learned that a personal blogger isn't a journalist and that I'm not a writer, a marketing guy or in PR in any way. I'm just a blogger, and I write because I like to.

Which brings me back to Hugh's post: Blogging has hopefully hit its peak of hype and those who are fad hopping are now moving on to Facebook updates, etc. and those who felt they "needed" to blog can move on to something else they "need" to do, and those of us who enjoy blogging for whatever reason can do it without the general misunderstanding of just a couple years ago.

It's nice. :-)

-Russ