The Great Blogger Abduction

To criminally paraphrase the Bonnie Tyler song: where have all the bloggers gone and where are all the blogs?

A scant couple of years ago I spent a ridiculous amount of time (thanks to my then newly acquired retired person status) scouting for personal blogs I could read, relate to, and be inspired by when writers block dropped in unannounced. I was a little discouraged at the time because it required a focused search – largely because I wanted to stay away from the “influencer’ type bullshit blogs that have swamped the web over the past few years – and was relieved when I could find some interesting sites written by a wide variety of people.

In an effort to get back to keeping something akin to a regular posting regime for this blog I went back to those bookmarks to get the old writing juices flowing, only to find most of them were either abandoned over the past couple of years or gone completely and showing the web hosts vacant site template (or offering to sell the domain for a squidgillion dollars).

I’m aware of the Great Migration To Social Media over the past few years to feed the

rapidly shortening attention span of the populace worldwide, and so I set about trying to follow the social links on the old pages (where they were abandoned but still showing). To my relief, only because my mind went immediately to the age group I was bookmarking and the possibility they had died rather than abandoned their blog, I found some of them alive and well and chasing the likes on Insta or Twitter (I refuse to call it X).

However, that only applied to some and so, once again chastising my mental whisper of doom, I set about Googling the name of the person behind the blog to see if they had upgraded to a swanky new website or were forced to set up camp with a new identity because of pesky hackers wanting to ruin their hobby and bring their book reviews or gardening journals into disrepute. This yielded very few positive results I’m afraid.

I had to succumb to the Mortality Test: checking out the last post (ironic I know) on their blog to see if there were any signs of imminent demise. Sadly there was actually two sites where the health challenges of the blogger were carefully documented and it became clear they had died. This I have to say made me a little sad, even though I’m of an age when finding people I “knew” had slipped away when I was otherwise engaged with my own life issues isn’t all that unusual anymore.

My research made me consider my own behaviour and how I tend to disappear from the blogosphere from time to time for significant periods of time. Okay I acknowledge I have so few “followers” on this site that I could keep one hand in my pocket when I go to count them, and since they’re likely to be relatives anyway and so if I stopped posting because I’d actually croaked they would likely have found out elsewhere, but that’s not entirely the point. Maybe I need to just post an “I’m still alive” post on a quarterly basis to keep the record straight. What do you think? And if I do decide to abandon ship (relax I just mean the blog and not this mortal coil) I should resolve to add my own last post letting people know why and where I can be found.