So I wondered if anyone had done a “life cycles of blogging” or “stages of a blog”, and there’s at least the beginnings of one:
Joi Ito quoted Ernie the Attorney who quoteed then-new blogger Steve Covell… about the stages of a blog:
1) There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don’t have a clue.
2) OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it than I expected. I just don’t see any really practical applications.
3) Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with.”
Joi added:
Actually, there is at least another stage:
4) Oh, no. I’m addicted to blogging…
and it goes on with a survey. Take it! It’s fun!
I would now add at least a few more:
5) Now… how do Imeet other bloggers to talk about blogging and blog about the experience and perhaps exchange bodily fluids with them… *
5a)…or perhaps maybe we could be just friends?
5b)…or we could exchange mophophotos?
5c)…or volunteer for Dean/Bush/Kerry/
5d)…or thrash the damn liberals/conservatives until their pointy heads bleed
6) What’s this Trackback thing do again?
7) Man, Trackback is so cool!
8) Trackback was so annoying I shut it off.
That’s pretty much it for my contribution to the Stages — all else is commentary. 😉
So I’m currently still floundering around in Stage 3 – asking the techhubby to find out about how to add things, occasionally tinkering with the style sheet and the main index file, thinking about how cool it would be to add a graphic banner and a third column and a bunch of other things.
And there are intermediate stages of the life cycle of blogging, too. Previously, I was in the “messing around with templates changing colors and screwing with divs” sub-stage. I’ll probably always be in the “checking stats for wacky search phrases and new referals” sub-stage. Heh. Arrested blog development.
I’m also in the early throes of learning basic HTML tags in order to fool around with formatted text, and in a parellel universe I’m at the “oh, this effect in Photoshop is actually pretty easy, but their help documentation annoys the hell out of me” stage.
Blogwise, I’m also at the stage (still Stage 3, I think) where I’m specifically searching for cool crap to stick on the sidewall, similar to other bloggers’ cool crap. This is different from randomly stumbling across cool crap (WeatherPixie, blogchalk and adding it). You see, I have a vague but otherwise Damn Fine Plan.
And the other day I noticed an actual directory of cool crap for blogs.
Yep, someone wrote blogger code – I used to have childfree code back when I hung out in ASC, so this is pretty familiar:
B1 d t k s u- f i o x e l c-
I guess this means I’m a pretty moderate moderate (I was non-aligned in HL, too)
Blogstickers – oh, I used to write “Frodo Lives” in Elvish, I surely need this, and a few others besides.
And then there’s the little grey/orangeorothercolor buttons… must steal those.
I got to thinking about all of this over the last few days, because I’ve been reminded of the first time I fell head over heels for the cool stuff I could do on the Internet.
Wow. WOW. I just realized that 10 years ago next week, I bought my first computer. That was the beginning. (yes, yes, it was a crap P/S 2 with a freakin’ 2400 baud modem).
Withing about a month of setting it up and turning it on, I subscribed to a mailing list (HIGHLA-L) that got upwards of 200-500 posts a day.
I was a very enthusiastic poster. I specialized in wacky quips, and eventually became responsible for recruiting and training the crack team of Special Forces stoats (don’t ask, they cleaned up the Weasel’s dirty work).
Not long after the first big flamewar (which was mostly the last big flamewar, because the List Goddess cracked a mean, but fair, whip) someone posted the “life cycle of a mailing list.” The stages are similar to those described here: first everybody is excited about the new list, then there are signs of strain but nobody rocks the boat, then when a bunch of new people waft in, all enthusiastic, one of the oldtimers cracks loose with flames, and in the aftermath a lot of people argue and leave in a huff. In the case of HIGHLA-L, someone eventually starts a big cooperative effort that involves joke factionalism and flag waving or possibly f*nf*c featuring list members as characters. Later on, simmering feuds between members of different factions (which usually result from the aftermath period) erupt into pitched battles online, with many people trying to pretend that it’s all still an imaginary or fictional war but a few people know it’s all about the body count.
Then a few people declare that they belong to no faction, create an imaginary hot tub (in Highlander fandom it was a Magic Spring), and invite everyone else to hop in and chill out.
After a while, there are no more big influxes of newbies, and “newbie” jokes get outlawed because nobody is that new anymore, and the Persons of Recent Arrival grumble about the Geezer chokehold on all the best running jokes. Membership stabilizes, and depending on the quality of posts and leadership, the list either continues indefinitely or goes into a decline (HIGHLA-L seems to be immortal, but volume is not what it was).
So now I’m wondering if there’s also a hot-tub stage to blogging, but with all the “friend of a friend” and social networks popping up all over, it seems we’re there already.
*I thought I skipped the all-important “bodily fluids” step, but then realized that soon after The Hub helped me get the domain and blog going, he got interested in Moveable Type himself and started his own blog.
