What, you didn’t think some whiny little bitch and his childish stunts would keep me down forever, did you?
Actually, I did consider shutting the blog down forever. For the second time in a year, I had become disillusioned. This time, it was about the “blogosphere”, and I had to stop and consider whether I still wanted to have anything to do with it.
You see, when I started this blog in March 2006, I naively believed that there really was a serious conversation happening online. I wanted to contribute my voice to that conversation. I never hoped to be one of the big blogs that receives millions of hits a day, but I did hope that others would find my observations worthwhile and worthy of notice.
Instead, I discovered that I had willfully blinded myself to what really appeared online. I had noticed only the substantial posts, and not the effluvia – and I certainly had not noticed that the effluvia predominated. Even on the big blogs – the ones with millions of daily hits – the majority of posts were of no real consequence whatsoever. Yet these seemed to be the most consistently popular! Commenters engaged in no discourse with one another, but seemed only interested in seeing their usernames in pixels; hundreds of posts would say nothing worth reading.
Even worse, the blogosphere seemed almost designed to prevent anyone new from getting noticed. Established bloggers linked to one another, and never cast their nets wider. Even Technorati, the essential index required for even moderate publicity, was biased against new blogs: by default, it is set not to return search results from blogs with less than “some” authority (whatever “some” means). It was like being back in high school again.
Let me be honest: what happened a couple of months ago hurt me. I had never attempted any cheap stunt to get myself noticed; I wanted to be noticed because I had written something worthy of notice. My first post was noticed, but by only one person, who has the same problems I do when it comes to publicity for her blog. When PZ Myers, whom I greatly respected, chose to reward the childish whining for publicity of some third-rate blogger by giving him his own post – yeah, it hurt me. I looked through that guy’s site; if it deserved notice, it certainly was not on the level that Pharyngula would give it. Meanwhile, I languished – what was it? – 28 pages down on Myers’ blogroll.
For over a year a half, I placed quality before quantity. If I had nothing to say, then I said nothing. If a post did not come together, it did not get published. In the end, it meant nothing. I realized, to my great personal shame, that I had deluded myself when I started adventures of ponzo, and I was no longer willing to continue in that delusion. All the posts I had written from that perspective had to go; they have been archived, but only for my own reference: they will not appear here again.
Yes, adventures of ponzo is herewith relaunched. This time is different, though. Like the title says, I am “more pissed this time”. And not just at the same things my would-be peers are; I am also pissed off at them. In the end, they could not keep me down, but how many others have abandoned trying to contribute their ideas to the world because they were not cute and perky enough?
Fuck them. I once said that the “adventures” part of the title of this blog was no longer relevant, but I was wrong: my adventures will just be very different from what I though they would be when I started out.
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