Across the vast landscape of the blogosphere, thousands of blogs sprout up each day – millions each month. Everyone wants a shot at instant publication and the even more instant gratification that is promised therein.
Chances are, just as many are abandoned; “We’re Open” sign cocked at a slight angle, florescent lights flickering, radios tuned to the static of a long since canceled format.
Blogs rarely die. They nearly always fade away, forgotten, given up for better pursuits, leaving a fossil record of past thoughts for future web archeologists to StumbleUpon.
For me, the example is Fresh Glue, a marketing/advertising blog from right here in Sioux Falls. A great site with some great insight. A blog I was always insanely jealous of, both for the attention it got and the quality of its posts.
Now, with Fresh Glue’s strongest personalities – P.R. specialist Nathan Schock and copywriter Greg Veerman – long gone, the blog has become seemingly abandoned. There hasn’t been a new post since October, and before that the content was sloping downward, uninspired. Some of the more recent contributors were well intentioned, but the passion just wasn’t there.
As Schock and Veerman went, so did the site. Fresh Glue helped fuel my love for clever marketing, introduced the company blog as a viable project and led me to meeting two of the area’s best marketing writers. It orchestrated the first (and, so far, only) Sioux Falls blogger meet-up.
Though this sounds like a eulogy, it’s not meant to be. Fresh Glue is still technically active. Meanwhile, Greg Veerman is still blogging about green marketing at It Grows on Trees and Nathan Schock is doing likewise at Greenway Communique, both continuing the tradition of passionate thought about a passionate subject.
And though this sounds reverential, it’s not. It’s just that their passion was so contagious. You couldn’t help but enjoy their insight. The old stuff is still up, if you’re willing to search for it; bones of a former successful venture, carbon-dated to a time when everything seemed to be coming up Fresh Glue.
We assume that the blogs – and the papers and the magazines and the television programs – that we enjoy are going to be around forever. They’re not. The odds are stacked against them. Media is fragile, touchy, easily out of favor and quickly forgotten. If anything, it helps us understand the value in appreciating what we have when it’s still around.
Sure, the posts still exist. But it’s the passion that keeps them alive.
Corey:
Indeed. Fresh Glue was also one of my favorite blogs. I always felt I learned something useful when I read it. How often can you say that about a blog, yours, of course excepted?
I keep FG in my aggregator, hoping they’ll return.
Excellent, thoughtful post, BTW!
Todd
SD Watch http://www.southdakotawatch.net
That’s the problem. Like everything else, blogs do come and go. Some stay longer than others, but eventually, even the best of us will fade away or stop entirely.
In the world of personal blogging which I inhabit, that truth is even much more volatile, one I struggle to fill with blogs that are worth my attention. Sadly, with so many blogs out there, it’s hard to find the gem of an underdog from the cesspool of the mainstream. Sometimes you do get lucky.
Sometimes.
And when you find that underdog, you hope to hell it sticks around long enough for you to root for.
I agree: splendid writing!
And as for withering blogs, I’m sure there’s a few in my reader, tucked away underneath the silence. Some of those I really consider as losses.