Glittering Eye Turns 10
Congratulations to Dave Schuler on a decade of blogging.
OTB co-author Dave Schuler is celebrating the 10th anniversary of his own blog, The Glittering Eye, this weekend. I’ve been a reader since the earliest days and it remains an outlier in the medium, consistently thoughtful and prolific. That’s hard enough for a group blog; it’s remarkable, indeed, for one man.
Dave offers a nice roundup of some of the postings of which he’s most proud and then offers,
Over the years my blog’s traffic has waxed and waned. Right now it’s in a waning phase. I can’t honestly tell how much of that is due to the audience for my work actually dwindling and how much an illusion due to bots and comment spam once having been treated as legitimate readers that no longer are. 90% of the notional hits I get are either bots or comment spam. I use various methods of blocking or slowing them but the constant battle is very frustrating to me. I’d rather be writing substantive posts than blocking comment spam but it’s part of the cost of blogging these days. I consider comment spam a crime, stealing space and bandwidth that I pay for.
Do I wish my blog had more traffic? Of course I do. Do I want crude and thoughtless readers? Not particularly. All in all I guess I’m satisfied with how things are. I’ve accomplished every goal I set for myself with this blog, albeit at a very small scale.
I intend to continue posting at The Glittering Eye as long as I live which, if family history is any gauge, will be for decades into the future. And I’ll continue to post about what interests me: current events, politics, history, opera, food, dogs, geneaology, and anything else that strikes my fancy. That hasn’t changed since the very earliest days.
That’s pretty much been my experience as well and our philosophies about the medium are similar. I’ve been less prolific the last year or two for a variety of reasons but have largely given up on posting massive amounts of “me too” material for the purpose of drawing a larger audience. Nowadays, I post either when I’ve got something to say or when I find something that I want to draw readers’ attention to.
As I’ve noted before, blogging is less communal than it was in those early days and the loss of that collegiality is among the many reasons I don’t write as much as I used to. Twitter, which offers that kind of engagement but less room for thoughtful analysis, has filled some of that void.
Among the other things I miss from the old days is the weekly conversations with Dave on the defunct OTB Radio show. The BlogTalkRadio software was frustrating and I gave up on the show when they started wanting to charge me an exorbitant amount of money to use it. But I miss spending an hour a week hashing out current events with Dave.
Congrats to him on a decade in this business and may he indeed follow the family pattern and enjoy many more decades.
Thank you, James. That’s very kind.
It doesn’t seem like ten years. More like twenty. 😉
I guess in Internet-years it’s an epoch.
Congratulations Dave. Unfortunately I only head over there a couple times a month to see if there’s anything that catches *my* fancy, but I always read your posts here due to the aforementioned thoughtfulness.
Same here 🙂
Just took a peek at the Eye for the first time. Jan! Where have you been and why are you Cage Fighting with Reynolds over there? We miss U Babe!
I only seem to lurk around Glittering Eye instead of commenting. Probably jan and Drew’s fault.