The future of my blog
One of my favorite places - Cannon Beach, OR
I haven’t posted here since late November. Wow, that was a long break. :-)
When I started this blog, I intended to keep posting here multiple times per week, basically forever. I really thought that I would do so, and keep doing so. Sure, I knew things would come up, and now and then I would miss a few days here or there, but I never thought I would be sitting here writing this sort of thing.
I have to admit that I have sort of fallen off the tracks as it relates to my blog. Like everyone else with a life and things to do - I have a life and I have things to do. Oh, and I have this thing called YouTube. I spend a lot of my free time creating the videos that I post on YouTube each week. And I love doing that. It inspires me, and the community there inspires me as well. In fact, I enjoy it more than I do trying to think of things to write here. And I think that having a good blog is more about the writing and the “content” than it is just me posting a photo, making a quick comment or two about it, and running off.
Over the last couple of years, my writing here on the blog has become less and less, and I have ended up just posting some quick comments about a photo, or just posting about a recent video that I shared on YouTube. And while it makes it look like I am “active” in my blogging, it was honestly about as passive as you can get while still putting something out here. I have been sort of phoning it in for the blog.
So now I sit here and wonder what I should do about this blog, going forward. Of course I am going to keep it, and continue to post here at times, but I don’t plan to keep aiming (and failing) at posting here several times per week. Instead I am thinking of this as being a place to share my thoughts in longer, written form (such as this note) as well as news about my photography, travels, or whatever.
I have a lot of articles and photos on this blog that I am proud of and worked really hard on, and I intend to keep them here. I like to have this archive of my work. But a blog is not really a good place to host a collection of images, in my opinion. And that is another thing that I have been thinking about…my collection of images.
I joined Flickr at around the same time I started blogging, which was late 2009 or so. I have over 7000 photos on Flickr, and I still find it to be a wonderful place to host photos as well as a supportive and inspiring community. So I will keep posting photos there as my collection of photographs that I share grows. I hope to have 100,000 or more at some point in my life. And I would like them all to be on Flickr.
But that is the thing - if you want to see my images. you can find them more easily on Flickr. They are organized and categorized and it’s easy to scroll through a lot of them and find whatever it is you are looking for. Or to just browse and enjoy it. And I am ok with that. For so long I wanted “blog traffic” and I felt like I did everything I could to get people to come to my blog. I get decent traffic, but I am no longer trying to get a lot of people to come to the blog. If they show up, that is great. But in this day and age, people prefer to stay on their social media site of choice, and those same sites don’t want them to leave anyway.
So I think my transition from a “blogger” (I always used that term loosely with myself) to a “YouTuber” (I really don’t like that term, but I do create a lot of YouTube content) has been a long time coming. I definitely think about YouTube more often than I think about the blog. I think of things I can create for YouTube, not the blog. So it’s definitely become my priority in terms of sharing whatever it is that I can share, that feels like it is a contribution to the world of photography.
So my plans are to continue to invest in the growth and development of my YouTube channel, and to write about things that interest me here on the blog, when I feel inspired to do so. And of course this means I may experiment with a new look here on the blog, since the “daily blog” sort of thing will no longer be my focus here.
So if you have been a frequent visitor or reader over the years, I really appreciate it. And of course you can always catch me on YouTube, Flickr, or even Twitter if you want to connect. Thanks for listening!
