when was blogging?

As no doubt is becoming clear, I'm blogging less and less, partly because moving interstate along with everything else I do is making me that much more busy, partly because I'm, er, running out of things to say, in a certain sense. And the View was intended as an Alice-specific blog. 

I always wondered when I would want to finish this blog, and I thought I would know when the time came, much as how I thought I would know when to move on from Alice and where I would go next. Now it seems the time is a-coming. It's not a recent decision, but something I've been pondering over the last six months (so don't worry that you've said anything to put me off blogging).

I've pondered starting a Melbourne blog -- maybe titled 'Northcoto-philia', or 'too much information' or 'permanent wedgie' (my usual state of being) -- but I'm not sure that yet another Melbourne blog is needed, when there are so many already and so many that are well done. But when was a blog ever necessary?

 And besides, what would I say? 'Melbourne's getting big. Hoddle St's even busier. Brunswick's all joozied up these days.' All this small-town-girl-in-the-big-smoke-wonderment could get monotonous.

I do remember the days when blogging had a raffish edge, maybe back around 2005 when there was a lot of energy in the Australian blogosphere. Barista has suggested to me that it was because blogging afforded an avenue of comment during the dark Howard years, when mainstream journalism became increasingly conservative. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with this summation, as there's always been a strong, personal diaristic strand in the blogosphere as well as a political one. I've sometimes thought that blogging was a bit like the outburst of small presses in the seventies when self-publishing became easier: perhaps there are always wannabee writers and pamphleteers about, looking for a suitable platform.  Back in the good ol' days of the early noughties, blogging was a slightly eccentric thing to do; now it's been banalised to a 'tool' used regularly by journalists and management types (curses!) Facebook and Twitter have also no doubt leached bloggers and potential bloggers away, which is perhaps not such a bad thing: how much bad prose do we really need cluttering up the internet?  Laura and I have both commented that thoughts we would previously have given fuller expression in a blog post often just get a one-sentence wrap-up on FB these days.