I’ve noticed in my stats over the last couple of days that I’ve been getting some hits off some genuinely vile googlings, things I’m not going to reproduce here. The hits have been on pages that contain no such content, and no content that could even be mistaken for the string searched for. I just examined the source code for one of my pages, trying to figure out what was going on, and discovered that someone had managed to embed a bit of code in my site’s footer, code which resolved into a bunch of links to some really Vile Shit.

The good news is that the code for some reason made the links and their associated text invisible, so they didn’t actually appear on any of my pages; the bad news is, of course, that someone was able to do this at all. So I guess it’s time for me to upgrade my WP install again — and to send out the message here: if you’re getting hits off inexplicable search strings, check your source code…

… since R. took off for the holidays:

1. Some percentage of my not-blogging is directly attributable to his presence here in Claremont. Which is to say not that he’s interfering with the writing process, but that some percentage (that same percentage) of my blogging was fueled by a general need for communication. And with him in the house, there’s always somebody to talk to. Hence, a much lowered need to talk to the internet.

2. I develop very bad habits when he’s away — or re-develop, as the case may be. I indulge all of my worst impulses, just out of a need to make myself feel better. Also because I can. Not that he’d fuss at me if he were here, but I’d feel like he ought to fuss at me, and so wouldn’t indulge in the same way if he were around.

These two things together might seem to suggest some sense in which blogging is a bad habit, which I don’t at all believe. But it is a habit that I associate with my living-alone-dom, rather than my life with him. And so if I’m going to re-cultivate that habit, without re-cultivating the actual bad habits (of which the less said the better, I think), I need to figure out — for the umpteenth time — some new mode or means of writing here, that can keep me going.

I’ve read (and written) any number of blog posts over the last few years analyzing the phenomenon of meta-blogging — posts that creep up on meta-meta-blogging, I guess: blogging about blogging about blogging. Some of these have focused on the notion of the “life cycle of the blog,” that most bloggers go through waves of excitement, enthusiasm, commitment, doubt, hiatus, return, re-commitment, boredom, and so forth, embroiled in an at time quite fraught tango with their blogs, built of love and hate, passion and violence and ennui, all entangled.

This is another one of those posts.

I find myself at a crossroads with this blogging thing, half losing confidence in it, and half still convinced that it’s important, to my work, my sense of myself as a scholar, my life. I’ve been pondering the possibility of stopping for a while — stopping with intent, rather than just drifting away — in part because I’m not sure how much good I’m doing here.

Frankly, I’m at a point where I’m just not all that interested in my own blogging, and I’m curious why. Perhaps it’s no more than a cyclical thing — it’s no accident that five years ago today I was thinking about much the same problem — feeling unable to come up with much interesting to say, in no small part because I’m unable to sit still and taskless long enough to think, unable to go through my daily life paying attention to the kinds of things worth writing about.

This time, however, these concerns are coupled with a set of less-than-attractive anxieties about falling readership. Partially, this is a stats-whore issue: since my migration to WordPress, my numbers are way down, and my Techorati “authority,” such as it ever was, has plummeted. These are probably not things I should be terribly concerned about — but, for better or for worse, I am.

So all of this — my apparently dwindling readership and my own diminishing interest — has me wondering why I’m still blogging. When I started, it was all about a need for immediate communication: I had all these small thoughts leftover from having just completed the book manuscript, and needed to get myself back into active conversation with other scholars after the isolation of grinding through such a long project. Lately, however, it seems like what I’ve been communicating has devolved into little more than rants and P.R., either complaining about being too busy or announcing the results of what I’ve been busy doing. And this dynamic doesn’t feel like it’s working anymore.

In part, I think, the problem has arisen because what I want right now is precisely that isolation that I needed to find my way out of five years ago; I’m moving into a phase of my scholarly life cycle when I want to stop everything else — stop writing smaller pieces and sit down with my research, trying to get a handle on the new, big project, which right now remains so amorphous that I can’t really grasp it.

What I need to do, if the blog is going to survive, is to find a way to make my blogging serve that project, to return on some level to writing for myself rather than an audience, to write less for communication and more for exploration, for investigation, for problem-solving — to make the blog part of the process, rather than something that’s working against the work I need to do.

Easier said than done, perhaps. But at least I’ve got a better sense of direction, and one that’s less reliant on my sense of an audience. The audience for the kind of work I need to do from here forward is, I think, primarily me, and the text I’m trying to write.

What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during the three frenetic weeks of travel that followed. But now I’ve been home for over a week, and I’ve managed one lousy little post in that time. And even managed to fail to link to the key item in that post.

But it’s not just my own blog I’ve been ignoring; I’ve got an alarming number of unread posts in my news reader. Something’s keeping me out of my usual mode of web activity. Maybe it’s my panic at the impending semester, and how much I’ve still got to do before I’m ready to roll. Maybe it’s my painful awareness of the number of my summer tasks that are still unfinished, and that need to be wrapped up ASAP. But maybe, too, it’s just the joy that I’ve taken in being offline these last few days, puttering around the condo and making the physical space in which I live feel like home again.

Whatever the cause, I’m hoping the silence doesn’t last long. In fact, here’s this, partially designed to keep me from feeling too comfortable in the long pause.

This was originally going to be another comment on the previous post, which I’ve been thinking about a bunch. Partially because meg seems to have gotten the idea that I’ve got something more substantive to say. And partially because my responses to Jason’s and her comments on the previous post have been sounding increasingly dismissive, when I was the one who raised the issue in the first place. How annoying: raise a question and then say to all responders, “that’s not what I meant, and it’s not terribly important anyway.” What I meant to say, of course, was “thanks; good point!”

Though I’m being all functionalist about the question of blogging and its relationship to web-based publishing right now — just trying to figure out how to make a small point in an in-process argument — meg and Jason have nonetheless raised an interesting set of questions: what would it mean, really, if blogs were “first”? What are the stakes of such “firstness”? And what does it mean that, as meg indicates, the history of Usenet has been pretty much entirely erased by the web?

What does it mean, for instance, that I discovered yesterday here, in a post that purports to ask whether blogging is dead, that Marc Andreessen, who has ostensibly begotten this entire thing, just started blogging five weeks ago? Andreessen points out the relationship between blogging and Usenet in his post on the “eleven lessons” he’s learned thus far, but the comparison isn’t terrifically flattering:

Those of us who have been on the Internet for a long time recall the heydey of Usenet — a world in which hundreds or thousands of conversations, most of them unmoderated, flourished among the lucky few who had Internet access prior to 1994. One of the clear negative consequences to the “great opening” of the Internet from 1994 on was the influx of spam and abuse that substantially damaged those discussions, and shut down many of them.

Blogging is clearly the second coming of high-quality Internet conversations, but it is also clear that comments on blogs run the same risk of being damaged by spam and abuse, and that new approaches to maintaining a high quality of discourse are required.

I find it fascinating that while so many folks define blogging entirely by the possibility of commenting (search around; it’s not hard to find someone who’ll say “it’s not really a blog if comments aren’t enabled”), Andreessen has turned off commenting and is relying on trackbacks and tagging (via Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, etc) for feedback. This strikes me as odd primarily because I find trackbacks, as I’ve nattered on about before, to be much more spam-prone (because radically insecure) and much less effective (because of the failures of different blogging systems to ping one another automatically) than comments; and while tagging is interesting as a metric by which one can get a sense of the zeitgeist (and thus might be useful, as we’ve discussed over at MediaCommons, as one facet in the development of a complex web-native peer-to-peer-review system), tagging doesn’t really create conversation.

But then, nor does shouting down everyone who comments by saying “that’s not right at all!”

(This semi-rambly and quite inconclusive post brought to you by my need to get back to my article already. The post title, by the way, was meant to be a play on the “MySpace: Threat or Menace?” type stories that litter the mainstream media, but I don’t quite have the spare processor cycles available to figure out how to pull that off.)

Somewhere, not terribly long ago, I heard or read someone make the argument that blogging was the first genuinely internet-native mode of publishing. I’ve been searching around for such a statement, and am coming up a bit dry. My fear is that this was just said to me in casual conversation, just someone opining. But, in the event that it wasn’t, have you come across anyone arguing something such as that, in, say, a citeable forum? I’d like to be able to use that point in the argument I’m trying to make right now, but right now it’s sitting there in that “arguably, blogs are the first…” mode that raises more questions than it answers.

[UPDATE, 11.00 am, CET: Interestingly, I've now found several sources that make the point exactly as I do, saying that blogs are "arguably the first" blah blah blah. Is there some magical point at which enough people suggesting-without-proving a point like that becomes convincing enough a part of the conventional wisdom that we can stop qualifying it with "arguably"? Or are such bits of hearsay precisely those that most demand questioning?]

Since my migration from ExpressionEngine to WordPress, my site traffic has fallen off by something between 60 and 75 percent. I want to attribute this to the change in my feed address, but if I’m being honest, I should also note that the distinct downturn coincided with my beginning to post on a relatively regular basis again. So perhaps I’ve driven my own audience away.

But if I’m going to attempt some kind of self-charity in this, and assume that there’s a technological reason for the downturn (rather than that I just suck), I’m not sure what to do about it. Perhaps I can persuade WordPress to publish a second feed at one of the old feed addresses, just to let folks know I’m still here?

Or perhaps I just shouldn’t worry about it at all, and adopt a more “if you write it, they will come” attitude. As though I’ve been given a chance to start over almost entirely, but with the benefit of experience this time.

I swore I wasn’t going to miss it this year, as I did last year and the year before (and the year before that, and the year before that). I even went so far as to put it on my iCal, so that I’d remember to mark the occasion, but then I failed to look at the calendar yesterday. It’s a bit disappointing. I mean, this was moderately significant: the five year anniversary of starting things up here at Planned Obsolescence. I’d meant to mark the moment, but as wonky as my moment-to-moment understanding of what moment it is has gone, it’s not surprising that I missed it.

In any event, to mark the just-having-passedness of the moment: I’ve instituted a little “Five Years Ago” link, to be found at right. I’m curious what will happen on a day when, five years before, there was no post, but I guess we’ll see.

Incidentally, if you’ve been reading Planned Obsolescence via an RSS feed, you’ll no doubt have noticed that the feed URLs have changed since the migration to WordPress. The feed is now available, conveniently, at http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/feed. At least one major feed reader caught the migration automatically and updated the feed URLs, but others may need to be changed manually.

Of course, if you’re only reading via an RSS feed, and if you’re one of those who needs to update the URL manually, it’s possible you’ll never get this message. A technological conundrum.

I’m tinkering a bit with my categories, trying to make them a bit more tree-like, but given that I’ve already got two systems represented here (the old tripartite novels/networks/inbetween structure and the more recent whatever-occurs-to-me structure), they’re not organizing terribly well. In any case, several of the categories at right expand when clicked upon, in particular “life,” “media,” “technology,” and “work.” But I’m dissatisfied, as some of the subgroupings are uncomfortable. Is “reading” really a child of “media”? (For me it is, which may say something about which way the wind is blowing in my academic affiliations.) But is “blogging” better considered “media” or “technology”? Or “work,” or “life,” for that matter? How did I end up with both a “blogging” and a “metablogging” category? Wouldn’t a blog post labeled “blogging” automatically be an instance of metablogging? In which case a blog post that consciously labeled itself “metablogging” would be, in fact meta-metablogging?

Sigh. More changes under the hood are afoot, though one hopes they’ll be pretty subtle.