Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

When I started this blog all the way back in...holy crap, 2011? Really? Anyway, when I started this blog back in 2011, it seemed like you couldn't swing a dead cat around without running into a blogfest, a bloghop, or some kind of "award." Liebsters. First lines. Sad songs. First loves. Remember these things? Someone out there would start them, maybe create a nifty little badge, crib together some rules and start tagging people, and it would spread across the blogosphere like ink on a paper towel.

The rules on the "awards" usually followed some variation of the pattern: answer a bunch of questions about yourself and/or your writing project, tag a bunch of people, visit and comment on their posts. For bloghops, you would sign up at someone's blog, and on the appointed day, you would write about a specific topic and jump around commenting on as many posts as you could. These things could be fun (or they could be pressure-packed), they could be ways to meet new people with interesting things to say, they could be ways to get more followers.

Where have they gone?

I can't remember the last time I saw a bloghop aside from the Insecure Writers' Support Group. Likewise, the last time I think I saw anyone who had been Liebstered, it was at least two or three years ago.

When I started this blog back in (shudder) 2011, the blog was already being declared dead on a regular basis. All the cool kids were on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Instagram. Platforms that I either don't know or don't like. But for a couple of years, anyway, the awards and hops and fests rolled on. I didn't always particpate--I'm not a joiner of stuff like this in general--but sometimes I did, and sometimes it was fun, and it was always interesting to see how people responded to the challenges posed in them. Is the lack of contests and hops and awards indicative of a dying world, or a more mature one that no longer needs these things?

In Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Roland the Gunslinger often noted that "The world had moved on." It conjures up an image of a place and people who are left behind, that time stopped carrying them forward. That is what it feels a little like, living in blog land these days, like one of those old western mining towns where the well ran dry and the mine collapsed and all but a few hearty souls lit out for the coast. Or maybe it's just this little corner of the world. This morning, I took a look at my reading list. Even after some recent pruning, I've got 52 blogs on my reading list. Of those, only 19 are active, and 9 of those are industry insiders. Where have all the writers gone?

Aside from the flight to Facebook and the like, one thing has happened is that bloggers seem to be collected at places like Writer Unboxed, Pub(lishing) Crawl and the like. Here, they get to post once a month or so, and while most of them have their own websites with a tab for their own blog, most seem to do their blogging either at these collectives or in guest posts for other collectives (often, coincidentally, when they have a new book coming out). 

I am curious about the people who no longer blog. Many of them left on a final post that said, in essence, "I'm taking a break, I expect to be back." My respons was usually, "Enjoy, we'll be here when you come back." I suppose that's part of why these people are still on my reading list: many of them felt like friends in the short time we read each other, and it would be sad to come back and find none of the old gang around, right? Leave no blogger behind!