I may as well begin my valediction here. June 24th 2007 I will have maintained a more-or-less steady output of blog-writing for three years, and I've chosen that date to lay down my
plume.
I'm going to continue with some other blogs, and I'm still debating exactly what to do with this sprawling, enormous piece of work which costs me money to run (the success of Blog of Funk = 16.66GB bandwidth last month, at a cost of ≈£30 / $60US) and I have made zero profit from it, preferring to keep it running as I started it for my own personal amusement and as a creative outlet. Having said that, the main reason for the decision to hit the cosmic blog pause button is not about money, it's about personal fulfilment - I don't get that from blogging now. My old blog-met friend {illyria} left a comment on this post
Blank Canvas:
finally, a post that describes the general state of affairs in the blogging world. thanks for that.I was heartened that one of the more compulsive, literate bloggers that I follow agreed with my take on it.
Now it's one thing that my writing in this blog may yet exist for times yet to come in the Internet Wayback Engine, at least, until the electricity runs out, but it's quite another to be storing three years of my personal writings in a database owned and run by a near-impenetrable corporation that
doesn't need to show up.Since fully contemplating the scary truth about Google, I ran through a few scenarios. What happens when things change geopolitically, for e.g. what if some future mega-corp, maybe Chinese company takes over Google? In the future, my gmail email (and all the archives) will be available to people who will have a different public agenda to "do no evil".
Whatever their private agenda may be, Google is still rooted in some kind of nebulous America where concepts of personal freedom determine the legal and illegal use of data. But, for how much longer? I don't trust capitalism to resist fascism, whether it stems from the right or the left.
Finally, in blog terms, less is definitely more. The less time I write here, the more likely I am to make other creative things happen - like writing books, making radio programmes, producing internet video, all of which I cannot do if I am committed to writing a blog in quite such a personal, intimate, exploratory way as I do here.
So the good thing about having a date in mind is that I can work with Blog of Funk a little longer, squeeze the juice out of it, extricate the final scraps of blogging nourishment; there will be no sudden goodbye.
Probably.