And this little IM conversation between Jason and I sums up pretty nicely why I don’t really post too much to this personal blog anymore:

Jason: I’m wondering if the age of personal blogs that have any meaning are over. It seems that a) you can do your own thing, but be obscure because instead of being one of 200 or 2000, you’re now one of 20,000,000 because the barrier to entry is a lot lower and everyone has an opinion,

b) if you do become popular you get a community of commenters and suddenly you have a relationship with your readers and that steers your site overtly because it’s not all about you anymore, or even subtly because you want to keep the readers you have, and unless you have a personality strong enough to go “fuck you, this is my site” and have people love you for it, you have to deal with that.

c) we’re in the age of mega-blogs, like Gawker and Perez and newsblogs and et cetera, and personal blogs are seen as quaint at best, ridiculously egotistic at worst, and that’s filtered down that

d) some personal blogs have become personal brands and all about selling the writer as an expert, and all the politics that that engenders that gets obnoxious for people like you and me who just want to write something funny occasionally, or make a point from our respective perspectives on culture as it affects us.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m completely aware of this blog as my personal brand. When something mildly hilarious would happen, I would run back to my computer, bring up a text editor and start writing, often adding mildly hilarious embellishments to fully get my point across. Two things happened that really changed this: At 31, the stories I would share back then seem distinctly more private now. Blogging about my parents separation and eventual divorce was therapeutic and defiant then; now, not so much. And blogging about the periodic depressive periods I have would just be, uhm, a downer.

The other thing is that whatever happens, I’m just trying to enjoy the moment, I guess. Owning the moment, as opposed to mentally processing it into an essay to share with others. And while that comes with a downside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life, it comes with the upside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life.

I guess this is just my way of saying that I’m not sure what the status of the blog is at this point. Like a lot of other old-school bloggers fascinated about web based communication tools, I’m on twitter and tumblr, which reminds me a lot of the type of blog posts I wrote my first year or two of blogging. It’ll be impossible for me to hide any of my identity at this point — I work for a social networking company, for gods sake — but as the methods of communication have evolved, so has blogging, and so I will as well. In what ways, we have yet to see.