A while ago I was aiming to start a green blog as an experiment, something separate to this, but I’m going to no longer update it, for a couple of reasons.
First, the Tumblr blog format isn’t really appropriate for what I was aiming for. Tumblr isn’t really geared up for thoughts, comments, or deep interaction. It’s about reblogging pretty pictures and looking quickly at cool stuff. Ideal for some things, not quite for what I had in mind.
Secondly, Twitter fulfils a lot of the role of Tumblr in spreading information about certain things quickly, except Twitter is open, which does a better job of broadcasting news outwards, while Tumblr seems closed. Also, you can now embed videos in Tweets effectively, making Tumblr further irrelevant.
Thirdly, writing book reviews for The Ecologist has started to scratch my environmental itches more thoroughly, and takes up way more of my time. I’d rather spend time engaging with interesting texts.
So, the blog was worth the effort as an experiment, and was fun, but is not really doing what I hoped it would achieve, and no longer seems as relevant. Perhaps if I’d based it on a WordPress blog, I’d have done better; but for anyone starting up a blog now, I think people will struggle. The hits were not too bad for a start-up blog though, of course, nothing like this one. For the debates I might have wanted, I can do so on here and on Twitter. There we go. I’ll leave the old site up online as an archive, but I won’t update it.
Even looking at the book blogosphere these days: it doesn’t take a genius to see new sites cropping up each day, so how does any new blog compete with such content? (I think I know the answers here: get lots of people on board to give interesting, varied content, do it regularly, do it well, make it look good, and don’t use Tumblr.)
I’ve also combined this with a streamlining of Facebook. I’m more concerned with privacy on there, and actually maintaining a network with people with which I’m more familiar and correspond with regularly – I don’t want to use it for reaching out. I’m dabbling in Google+, but to be honest, I think that could go the way of Google Buzz at this rate.
So here and on Twitter will be my main hang-outs in future. I don’t think there’s any harm in holding up my hand to say it didn’t really work.
