For the past couple of weeks I have been mostly blogging at Vox, where I can set my posts to ‘private / friends / family’. Yeah, like LiveJournal, but I’ve never felt at home at LiveJournal – it doesn’t look or feel like blogging to me there, and I’ve never got my head around its bizarre GUI.
Back when I started (98/99) blogging appealed to me because of the small and friendly community of people involved in it. A couple of hundred webheads, mostly American. When blogging spread and reached The Netherlands, things quickly got nasty.
The second wave of early Dutch bloggers took delight in bullying. I quit my Dutch blog very soon after and retreated back to my English blog(s) where things were still quite peaceful. And then blogging went world wide, it went A/N, it went political, it went… fucking mental. And part of me went: ‘oh, you’re no fun anymore’.
In an article in Time Out Chicago Mena Trott says:
“When we were developing Vox, it was for the type of people who didn’t have blogs. But along the way, we found that our early adopters—people already really comfortable with blogging, who were testing it out and giving us feedback—fell in love with it.”
“Being online can be fun. We want to capture that. This is supposed to be pleasurable. If you want to write posts that never get troll comments, that are just for your friends, that’s completely acceptable.”
“What we’re trying to capture is how we felt about blogging in 1999, 2000, 2001.
“That your community is small enough that you’re just with people who care about you. You’re communicating with people you know. And that’s a way to express yourself more.”
And that’s exactly how I feel. So I’m blogging at VOX for the smallest group of people you can imagine and it doesn’t matter because I stopped caring about readership numbers (which have dwindled dramatically) on my personal weblog quite some time ago.
I still have to figure out what to do with eachman.com, but I may just make it a link or aggregate blog.