Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small.

Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have.

A lot has changed since then. Professionally, I have found my niche and am happy with where am today and can be in the future. The idea of being a single mother transitioned from being a handicap to being a source of strength. The most recent change in has been my marriage to a wonderful man whom I will refer to as DB. As we build our new life together  and work on J getting comfortable with having a father in her life, I will need to take time and energy away from my favorite third place of over five years. I will continue to write here but not as frequently and I may also take a different very direction with my blog.

I hope all of you who read this blog will continue to check in every once in a while.

Safe Place

This observation about the nature of blogosphere seems to explain why I have found it very hard to follow some of the better known blogs out there. 

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you’re with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can be pretty defensive of their space, and sometimes stream like lemmings through the aether to attack a blogger that they perceive as threatening.

While the material in the blogs I try to follow is worth reading, the space in which the writing and the exchange of ideas is talking place, as the author points out is quite a hostile one. I find that the ambiance does not encourage me to return too often - I content myself with reading short excerpts of the posts via Google Reader. That way, I remain in safe, neutral ground and enjoy the content without the strident (and all too often one-dimensional commentary). Extending the analogy to the functioning of democracy as the article does, it is easy to see how people may choose to remain in their respective safe places and not participate in the democratic process.

Attribution

If a majority professional publisher start to use solutions like Attributor to monetize their content, it would be at the cost of lost prolificity in blogosphere, twitterscape and the like. Today, anyone with an internet connection and an opinion can go to town for free, re-linking to their sources without fear of having a fee slapped on them for their trouble. It seems to be fair to everyone, only attributions that result in search engine rankings at par or better than the orginial source shoud be paying (if at all).

The no-name blog that shows up on page 30 of search results is noise that no one is hearing anyways - to that extent their attributions have little meaning. They should probably just be allowed to add their two cents for free. This would give the little people who feel empowered today with blogs and tweets as their vehicle for communicating ideas to continue to enjoy that freedom.

Fading Away

In reaction to one blogger's post about the demise of blogging - or more correctly the fading relevance of the medium, one reader speculates that there will be a new discipline of internet archeology. The practitoners of this discipline will presumably trudge through dead and defunct blogs that by then only live in the Wayback Machine and try to reconstruct a sense of the people and the times that the blogs once thrived in. If you are an individual blogger without the clout of the "A Listers", perhaps the only thing that will keep you going is your own desire to write just for the sake of it.

This is almost as thankless and unrewarding as a starving artist toiling away in solitude in a musty basement - sans clientèle, patrons, fame or money. All they have is the compulsive need to create art (in the case of the bloggers, share their thoughts and ideas with the world) and as long as that is strong enough they will continue to produce against all odds. Some will be able to strike it big, most of the others will move on from art to more mundane things that will pay the bills and the like. A very small minority will soldier on without any tangible incentive to do so. It is much the same with individual bloggers.