little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

Dear Internets: It’s Not You, It’s Me

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.

When I started blogging six years ago, I had no real expectation that anyone would be interested in what I was writing. When I realized people were visiting it blew my mind. Out of that have come some great friendships and that alone makes this little experiment worthwhile for me. I have a few friends who recently started blogging and it seems as if from day one they’re talking about how to grow traffic, which isn’t necessarily new, but they’re also deep in thought about how to make money of their endeavors. I don’t say much to that. I wish them luck but in my head I’m thinking, “You’re gonna need it.”

I’ve pretty much done everything you’re not supposed to do build a following and now I’m sort of grateful for that because the small group of folks who read me on a regular basis are friends and that’s maintained the general enjoyment pretty stable. Though, yeah, some days I wonder how much longer I’m going to keep it up.

[...] Ernie said. 100%. It’s not just as fun as it was in [...]

I seem to have caught on at the tail end of the heyday of blogging. Hard to believe I started on a community you knew so well about 3 years ago, but only just one year ago decided to take the plunge and go for the real deal. I seem to be in the middle… surrounded by the newbies who push for the numbers and the ads, and the original ones who I missed meeting at just that right time, and so don’t have much of a reader base even (well, it was building, then I screwed something up on my feed and lost them all, but that’s another story altogether).

I’ll be around, continuing to do my thing, and will look forward, as always, to whatever you post here.

I started journaling/blogging/whatever in 2000. I started doing it old-school, but laziness and the lack of interest to stay on top of the game in terms of blogging platforms, design, etc., I retired to ready-made journaling communities. I’ve always had the exact audience I’ve ever wanted: several dozen people around the same age as me, potted around the world, who weren’t afraid to leave their opinions or laugh or cry along with me. I’ve also been read by a few local reporters and have been featured in human interest stories in the newspaper and TV, giving me a bump in readership that, frankly, I didn’t enjoy.

I’ve been a reader of LYD almost since I first started blogging. I was (briefly) a contestant in one of your game shows. I had to drop out, I believe, due to the death of my grandmother. Still, I felt honored.

I’ve always enjoyed your writing, Ernie. Even if it was a paragraph after a three-month hiatus, I would get really excited to see the little (1) beside LYD in my RSS reader. You have created this little karmic happy bubble in my corner of the world. Whether you never write again or if you pick it back up, I’ll continue to always have fond memories of your entries and thankful I got to experience your life along with you.

Of course one way to short circuit some of this is to completely disable comments, which more and more people are doing and I heartily support.

Also, I sense a small movement back to having personal websites, in any one remembers those, instead of blogs.

Personally, I treat my public blog as a stage, where I can recount amusing anecdotes, point out interesting links, or sometimes rant about the state of the world. All at the same time. But nothing I wouldn’t say in a pub.

The personal stuff, about relationships, feelings, emo stuff if you will, is hidden on another blog on LiveJournal, which has the huge advantage in that I can only allow certain people to read it. Plus, LJ has that kind of community where you can be emo to your black heart’s content.

In the last episode of Six Feet Under, Claire tries to deal with her emotions by taking a photo of her family. Nathan whispers “You can’t take a picture of this, it’s already gone.” I think that’s when I really quit blogging.

I agree that in the age of megablogs and “blogs” and of information overload, it feels so different from seven years ago, when blogs seemed so cool, and the ones that caught my eye were the edgy designed ones and gay asians I could relate to.

But what to do with the stories you have already shared? Perpetual archive, or to be expunged from the Internets?

Being a fan and friend, it’s always nice to see anything you’ve written. If that won’t take the form of blog posts anymore, so be it. You have to do what works for you! This blog has been a joy for a long time, but it’s your blog. When it stops working for you, you should stop writing it.

With that said, how do I follow Ernie in these other, mysterious places where he now posts updates?

I think that all of our blogs have changed and deteriorated possibly because of the reasons your friend listed and possibly because like most other things our generation uses, we get bored of it. Your blog has always been inspirational to me, not for the content but for the fact you were wililng to share with us, your reader. I think a lot of us are at the point of not knowing what to do, Tumblr and Twitter and for me my Podcast have made my blog kind of irrelevant… I used to have ONE place to say what I thought… now… I have many more that require a lot less thinking which when I’m bored with something… well makes it even harder to update. I can understand where you come from but I must be honest when I say that every time I see a post in your RSS feed… It’s the first one I click on, so I’ll miss it if it goes away

I’d never call you blog quaint or egotistical.

There’s a whole bunch of blogs I read just because I enjoy that person’s writing style or sense of humour. Yours falls squarely in to that category for me.

I use NetNewsWire to read feeds. It changes a feeds colour from black to brown when a feed hasn’t been updated in a while. A lot of my feeds are turning brown.

Although I totally agree with everything you said. For me, I will miss being able to catch up on what’s what with you, and with Jason, and the myriad of other friends i have met, and known, and keep track of via blogging.

There is this regret I have that I can’t be BFF with some really amazing folks, who I enjoy immensely, but for whatever reasons, really only see IRL once in a great while, and who I can keep track of through their blogs. It allows me to feel some semblance of connection, where there probably wouldn’t be one, if you weren’t writing however sporadically.

Deep Bows, and Much Love
V

I agree. I’ve noticed lately that most of the blogs I subscribe to are specialist ones in which I have some obscure interest.

My favourite blogs are the personal ones, but the personalities I love are deserting the internet. As for my own blog, I’ve managed to alienate almost my entire readership by pissing them off some way or another by not sharing their opinions. I felt bad, yet…I can’t be the exact same as everyone else and share all the same opinions. I wonder sometimes if I can put together a print ‘zine and go back to that route.

(By the way, my husband says we met when you were in Vancouver in 2005. At a picnic.)

Have you read anything by Augusten Burroughs? “Dry”, “Sellavision”, “Running with Scissors”

Poor guy had a horrible, abusive childhood and a chaotic, drug and alcohol-soaked adulthood. Pours out his soul onto paper in a series of very funny, touching books.

I just finished reading “Possible Side Effects”. He opens the book by noting that characters in these little vignettes have changed, details have been omitted or radically embellished, and some of the stories just might have been made up (more or less).

Perhaps this is the route you could take with your personal blogging. You’ve got a good voice and plenty of material - take it and spin it into something separate from your personal life.

Eric in Seattle

[...] Little. Yellow. Different. published a conversation on the origins of the demise of blogging: [...]

*sigh*
Do you got a first-aid kit handy?

Ernie, I know exactly how you feel. Lately, I’ve been feeling the pressure to make my blog either an extension of my resume, or at least not to post anything there that an employer or potential employer might not like to see. That really saddens and annoys me. It ain’t 2000 anymore…

Dude, at the risk of sounding like the moral of an afterschool special, you don’t have to be unique, you only have to be you.

Creativity is synthesis.

I hear you brother.
I miss blogland circa 2000.

haha, i’m so lucky to be living in the same city as Ernster…

but ya, LYD is DEAD! LONG LIVE LYD!

I see personal blogging as our little private soap operas, I have to say I enjoyed yours very much. I completely understand that you don’t want to expose your life any more, it happened to me when I realized people where actually reading…

A friend just said that blogs are today’s stand-up comedy. And it’s true. So don’t go.

The hole is deeper than you say. I can barely bear to leave this comment.

We built the form and the software and the idiom, and we loved that band. Then everybody started loving that band. So, natch, we had to stop loving that band. Natch.

Still think that, one of these days, I’ll get enthused about posting again to something that’s not a “blog” — whatever the fuck that means to folks by now. Could do it right now, but don’t feel the jazz. The old jazz. The subdued rush of committing.

Me, I don’t write for the drawer. For a second there, in the day, I was on channel 81. Now it’d be channel 561781. Not at all the same proposition. Hey, it was always a meritocracy, we knew that. But it’s much harder to motivate so far out the crowded band.

Thinking lately that I should decide to write just for my daughters, the wonderful Quillio girls. They’ll always read me, and others looking-in is perfectly fine. Natch.

LQ

sometimes people wish they can take a picture or video tape their whole life and look back on it…

personal blogging for me is kinda like that…
but i dont have to be literal; i can post a song or picture or anecdote that perfectly describes my situation at that specific point in time of my life without having to actually do a “dear diary” entry.

…and looking back on stuff can be pretty inspiring… especially the emo stuff…
but what do I know, lol
keep blogging ernie, =)

I understand all the reasons and they are good ones. But I really like your blog …your sense of humor… and your realness. Don’t blog out of obligation…if you have something to share with us share it. I know I will continue to check this site.

I hear ya brutha!

This is BS…You need to keep blogging in order to entertain me!!! I need funny chinese-american momma jokes. I need funny chinese-american gay jokes. I need funny APhiO jokes.

[...] to admit this, there’s no denying that Elish gets only the most superficial of news. Really, Ernie summed it up best over here, and Alison takes it one step further. Please go read what they’ve written, because it sums [...]

I am so ridiculously late to this party it’s almost embarrassing. But then again, it is, still, a party. Even if it’s no longer a mid 90’s student rave in a field and has matured instead to an asparagus scented town-house dinner party…

Interesting reading. I bring wine.

I found that over time, my moblog became my main way of “blogging” as opposed to my regular blog. Blame it on the cameraphone. After TextAmerica dot com died, my moblogging moved to flickr. I still flickr way more than I blog. Now I go back in my flickr archives to find out what I was doing when, like I did w/ my blog archives. I just recently started blogging again, but mainly because I enjoy it and want to write more.

I also find, like someone else said, that people are making more old-style “home pages” now. I think the reason for that is (and in my case is) because people are on SO many different social-networking sites and also people may have several subject-specific blogs. (I have a dog blog, a photo blog, a travel blog, an art blog etc.) So linking to all of those other online presences can be done from one “jump page” or “home page. Old home-pages linked to sites we found interesting, new home-pages link to ourselves as we exist on other sites.

I don’t know if my new blog will be like my old blog. One thing I AM doing, though, which I am enjoying, is I’m creating a “life stream”, where I’ve created one page where I list all my old blogs (including old backed-up archives) by date, so that anyone (but mainly myself) can go back as far as 1996 and see what was I was doing online. It’s kinda fun.

I find it really interesting how the appearance of new tools changes the way we express ourselves online. Over my eight years of blogging, I’ve clearly seen an evolution in what I write.

Of course, we change as human beings, and that’s to be taken into account too. But Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and YouTube (even Flickr!) have all had their impact.

We tried to touch upon this subject during a panel at BlogTalk last spring, but I’m not completely happy with it — it stayed a bit superficial, in my opinion. If anybody has research on this phenomenon or ideas to share, I’d be interested in hearing them.

I guess the place to start is examining and analyzing what we blog for, and then seeing how some of these new post-blogging tools might be better at achieving some of these goals than good ol’ blogging.

[...] I’ve never met but will probably follow as long as they keep writing, like Ernie, even if he’s not as inclined to put himself out there as he used to be, because I’ve read him since the beginning, and his blog feels like an old [...]

I think about this stuff a lot. Those were the days. Sometimes I think I should have stuck it out and tried to “go big.” But …

Now I enjoy the irony of a templated blogspot blog. I don’t tell anyone local about it and I say whatever I have to say *somewhere* before my head explodes and hope for the best.

I think I have like 6 readers, and it’s kind of nice because it’s really just an outlet for me.

But the rush is gone and the landscape has shifted too much to get it back. Thanks for being part of it.

You’re one of the funniest people I read, and I (really) hope you continue to write. But if you don’t, many thanks for providing me with good laughs and thoughtful insight.

Persoblogs aren’t dead. They’re still a place to vent, to share stuff, to reassure yourself you’re not crazy or alone. They’re still an insight into the lives of others, similar to one’s own or vastly different. I don’t think the world (and condescending worldview) of the mega(money)blog touches the average small fry persoblogger.

That said, there must be all sorts of pressures in the stratosphere that LYD inhabits. So… thanks for all the funnies and the stories. You’ve been making me laugh and sniffle since I was 16 and now I’m heading to 23. See you in whatever medium you choose next.

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