After getting an e-mail from someone today I realized I haven’t posted anything in this blog in a month. The problem, as I have alluded to in previous posts, is that if I find an interesting article I can post it to the MI-Telecom Mailing List in about 30 seconds (EDIT: This list is now essentially defunct, so I’m not posting there anymore either), whereas if I post to this blog it will likely take more like 20 minutes at a minimum, and that’s only if I don’t do any extensive commentary (EDIT: That was true when I was using Blogger. WordPress seems to be MUCH faster and more responsive – I wish I’d tried it long ago!).
But also, when I have posted in the past, the number of comments I’ve received (from people other than fairly obvious big telco shills) have averaged only a bit above zero per post. Popular blogs get lots of comments, so I can only assume this blog never caught on (EDIT: What I didn’t realize was that I WAS getting comments, but until sometime in 2007 Blogger never bothered to notify me that I had posts that needed to be approved. When they finally corrected that, I found I had 75 unapproved posts, some dating back over a year!)
The moral here is that if you like a blog, leave a comment (preferably a supportive one) every now and then. Otherwise the blog author may figure that his or her message has been lost among the millions of other blogs out there, some of them sponsored and promoted by high-powered commercial organizations. (EDIT: And if they are using Blogger, you might send them e-mail and tell them to check to see if any comments that need to be approved!)
I applaud the other bloggers out there who are willing and able to stick with it day in and day out, although I do have one word of caution – don’t lose your focus. I’m thinking of one blog in particular that I used to try to read every day but which lately has diverted off onto unrelated interests of the blog author. That’s not objectionable once in a while; everybody has other interests, but when almost every time you go there you see new posts totally unrelated to the subject matter you thought you’d be reading about, you lose interest pretty quickly. In the case of the blog I’m thinking about, that’s bad because when they do stay on topic the posts are excellent, it’s just that people are busy and don’t want to have to deal with a lot of other, off topic stuff to get to what they’re interested in, which is why topical blogs serve a real need – in effect the blog author pre-selects interesting items for you.
Until I can report something other than the big telephone companies trying to (and, for the most part succeeding in their attempts to) take over the (telecommunications) world, and until the legislators and the FCC and their minions are once again pay attention to consumers, rather than how to make the big phone companies even bigger and badder, I doubt I’ll have the desire to blog further (which means I’ll probably be dead first). Show’s over, go home (or at least go to one of the many other fine blogs listed in the sidebar).
(EDIT: Okay, I’m not promising that I’m going to resume regular posting, but I’m not in a much of a funk as I was when I originally posted this. A lot of it had to with Blogger’s platform, which I found painful to use. WordPress seems a LOT better to me. So no promises, but who knows, I might get back in the groove.)
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