Unlike a personal style blog, in which generating new content can be as simple as getting dressed in the morning, producing a decorating or D.I.Y. blog involves considerable time, expense and domestic upheaval....I don't read these blogs — or personal style blogs, for that matter — but I see the commercial value of concentrating on material that matches up to products so you can get advertisers. But then you're in a bind. What once grew out of love and felt fresh, casual, and intrinsically rewarding would become a dreary obligation. And if you're writing about style — home or personal — you'd no longer have the attitude to that readers are coming to you to get for themselves.
“My mom comes to my house and there’s this revolving door of furniture,” [one blogger] said. “She can’t understand it.... That’s the process. I love when a room is done, but let’s be honest: It’s going to be changed.”
September 25, 2014
The NYT has an article about bloggers getting tired of blogging — "When Blogging Becomes a Slog"...
... but it turned out to be all about home renovation and decoration blogs run by bloggers who generate material by continually renovating and redecorating their own homes. Of course, that's going to get tiresome!
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9 comments:
Too tired to comment.
At the top of the page is a link to "next blog". Most have been dormant for years.
Started strong, then petered out.
Paraphrasing Mark Twain in Innocents abroad:
First day "glorious( on and onand on for 10 or twenty paragraphs.
By the second week, journal entry is:
"Today, same as yesterday."
What once grew out of love and felt fresh, casual, and intrinsically rewarding would become a dreary obligation.
--- Wait, what were you talking about again?
You have to have a basis for the consistent energy and wanting money out of it is a huge problem if what you are trying to do is look like you're doing it for the intrinsic pleasure of writing.
You have to actually love it. If you're going through the motions, it will show. You'll feel bad and it won't even work.
I wonder how many bloggers were inspired by Julia and Julia? Julia Powell, remember, blogged about cooking through Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking in one year. And got a movie deal out of it.
"Aha!" says inspiration, "that's the secret.* The secret to getting the movie deal from blogging is to be totally obsessive about it."
Five years down obsession gulch and no movie deal can burn a person out. In the end you're just an anecdote in a New York Times article.
* * *
*Perhaps Julia Powell drained that secret of its magic in the first go. Russ Parsons at the LA Times wrote an essay on the movie that dispatches obsession blogging in one brutal aside: Amy Adams is also appealing as Julie Powell.... That likability is no small trick when playing a character whose main literary attribute was pretty much one endless whine.
Sorry, I guess I was being obtuse ... thinking about my sex life.
Wouldn't being in a position to renovate/redecorate other people's homes almost be a prerequisite to blogging about the subject?
Ann Althouse: "You have to actually love it. If you're going through the motions, it will show. You'll feel bad and it won't even work."
I think this is only part of the reason that sites like yours and Ace of Spades HQ succeed (not that you are suggesting otherwise, I know better than that).
In addition to the above, I would add that you can read a perspective that is not easily found elsewhere or anywhere else.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that you just happen to be in Madison where some interesting political events have unfolded.
After 15 years of blogging about standup (and constantly figuring out ways to evolve and differentiate our blog from other blogs who sought to mimic us in one way or another), we mothballed our site. We are now harvesting content from that decade and a half to write a book. More and more bloggers will burn out or run out of ideas on how to evolve. (At the outset, they expected a legacy media company to drop a sack of cash in their laps so that they could retire. When it didn't happen, they had to examine why they were still blogging.)
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