Feeling particularly depressed today about the act of weblogging/photoblogging. Certainly my site gets a lot of attention, but it's from the WRONG PEOPLE.

I've been doing daily maintenance work on the site. What kind of work? Not responding to e-mail or comments (because I get so few) mostly I'm cleaning out comment spam and tracking down people who are stealing my images and bandwidth. Outside of writing and posting photos, most of what I do on this site now is try to subvert people who are using my weblog for their own selfish ends - to sell something stupid or disgusting (like pre-teen rape porn) or to boost attention to their own weblogs (by stealing and posting my images on their own weblogs without providing credit).

In light of the ongoing battle against parasites, I'm having a hard time defending the public-ness of my photoblog. I get something out of this site, but I could just post it for myself or put a password on it and make it "friends only."

The flip side is that I have to take some of the blame. I haven't been a good photoblogger for quite a while, although I've been better recently. I post too infrequently and at times I've forgotten to respond to people who've e-mailed me about my site. Similarly, I'm not the most active photoblog visitor, I rarely post comments or give feedback to the bloggers who run sites I like, I'm a lurker and lurkers are useless. They're parasites too (albeit harmless ones). In biology they call it commensalism, where one organism (the lurker) benefits while the other is unharmed (the blogger).

• • • • • • •

COMMENTS ( 2 )

• • • • • • •

<< | >>