Lost In The Blogosphere

We all know the thing called the ‘blogosphere” is bloody big. There’s something like 600 million blogs. About a third of the web. And 7.5 million new posts published a day.

Fuck. Where does that leave ordinary mortals like us?

Makes you wonder where all those blogs came from. I reckon it kicked off around the turn of the millennium. The digital landscape was quiet, tidy. Then? Boom. A violent explosion of personal opinions. And folk writing about what they had for tea.

Now, I like reading space stuff. A bit of physics as well. It baffles me, being honest. But I read about this thing called the “Hubble Constant”. It says something about the further away galaxy is, the faster it’s legging it away from us .

Blogging is like that, right?

The more niche a blog is, the faster it buggers off from the possibility of anyone reading it. Well, apart from a couple of Bots.

Another way to think about it is, the World Cup is finished now. We’ve had weeks of seeing stadiums rammed full of people. What about if you were in the stadium and needed to catch the attention of people across the other side? No loud hailer. No bloody vuvuzela, nothing.

That’s a lot like blogging as well. You’d have no chance. With thousands of people yelling and hollering all around you.

So yeah. The unread post. I got chatting to a fellow blogger. He reckoned you have to do as much work promoting your blog as writing it.

—You got to get the SEO right and all that, Andy.

—Nah, fuck it, they’ll find me if they want to read—

—No, mate, they won’t. How can they? There’s millions of us out there.

—Yeah, I know. So your SEO bollocks is not gonna help, either.

—Could be, but not doing it? Bloody no chance.

He’s got a point. Every day, loads of words get typed into content management systems. By people who reckon they’ve go something to say. Those posts exist in a state suspended animation. Until someone actually clicks the link. Until then, the post is both a masterpiece of writing and a rambling sequence of typos, at the same time.

Since the clicking of the link is rare, the web is held together by loads of invisible content. Content that nobody is actually looking at.

Then, there is the great nothingness of comments. Or emails. I’ve given up having a comments section. Either some bot will send you a message complaining how shit your post is. Or, silence. Nothing. Zilch. The great emptiness. The trouble with that is: you have no idea if people are reading. Or liking what they read.

Blogging platforms do nothing to help, either. In case you thought about moving to one of those. When everyone is broadcasting, nobody is listening. We’ll reach a state of perfect information equality. Where the total sum of human knowledge lives in loads of "Lifestyle and Wellness" blogs. Then? The entire internet will give up.

It will be a quiet, polite end. Punctuated by a final, automated post. It will have a title like: "10 Things I Learned While Watching My Blog Explode.”

But, we carry on typing. Broadcasting our signals into the void. Hoping that somewhere, on a distant IP address, another human being will have a read.