michaelmistretta.com

While I was browsing twitter today, I happened to stumble across this “post” from Ted Winder. Basically, he was expressing his frustrations with the blogging medium, and has decided to quit. In his final farewell, he makes a couple of statements that I disagree with, and were blatantly targeted at myself. Let’s tackle this one Gruber-style.

I accidentally deleted my wp-content folder. You know, that essential folder with your design and plugins in? Me, being me, I didn’t have a backup - I don’t actually have backups of anything. Yeah, stupid.

Hey, don’t sweat it. I still remember the day that I accidentally deleted everything on my computer. I wasn’t a believer in backups then. Now I am.

The second reason is that blogging is overrated. What’s the point? A lot of the stuff I read on personal blogs now is stuff I already know - really simple, obvious stuff put into some exaggerated context by the blogger in question.

Woah, big statements there. By calling blogging in itself “overrated”, you are in fact saying that any medium that people use to express themselves is overrated. On the contrary, I would say that blogging is underrated. It is now possible to make your voice heard even if you aren’t a celebrity or a multi-millionaire.

Now for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that you are talking about the content on these blogs - specifically “personal blogs”. I, like yourself, feel that there is a lot of junk content on blogs today. Spam, plagiarism, repetition, you name it. In fact, that is the very reason I abandoned that path, and wrote a letter to the blogosphere concerning it.

And recently, more and more people are writing on their blogs about ‘journeys through life’, about how blogging is all one big journey. Now, forgive me if I’m being rude, but no-one honestly cares about some random persons life, and blogging is most definitely not any kind of journey.

Ouch, that hurt.

I used to think like that too. Blogging was just a way to get information across. But after I began to subscribe to personal blogs, I started to look at blogging through different eyes. There was an emotional connection. I enjoyed sitting down and reading through a long blog post. I wanted to know about “random people’s lives” and what they are doing. That is the very reason I use twitter. To connect with others. If you don’t care about that person’s life, just click the unsubscribe button. No need to complain.

And I’ve said it before, blogging is a journey. A journey that I enjoy taking, and enjoy watching others go through. I’ve watched people (including myself) change and develop over time, and grow into a much better blogger the more they perservere.

Many people consider “tweets” and blogs to have no lasting value. I have to strongly disagree. There have been tweets and blog posts that have been moments of realization for myself, and have indeed changed my life.

It’s typing. That’s all it is. Typing, combined with the uncontrollable want to be popular.

Nope. It’s genuine thoughts that are being expressed through typing. Look beyond the words, and you may actually discover a deeper meaning.

And about the “uncontrollable wanting to be popular”. I write about my interests what’s going on in my life. If people think that’s cool, by all means, give me all the fame and fortune. I’m not going to change the way I blog because of it though.

I really do no have time any more to be churning out content, and it’s not worth me re-designing my blog. So I’m going to say thank you to all of my ex-readers, and leave it all behind.

RIP Ted Winder. The blogosphere will miss you.