Priorities

I decided to post this here because it kind of goes along with Ben's post lifeinfalls. Not so much because the blog I will mention is leaving, but because many good voices are missed in the desire to be with the popular crowd.

Scott from Poetic Leanings is calling quits to his everyday posting and his issue posts. He will still be posting occasional poetry, which I highly recommend reading, but his voice will be missed in so many ways. I can totally understand why he is doing it too.

It takes a lot of time to put together ideas and then try to make then intelligible to your visitors. When your visitors are only a few a day, it hardly seems worth it. I believe Scott got more daily hits than I did, but I write more for my own sanity. If I based my blogging on hits, I would have quit a long time ago. It gets discouraging to spend time putting something together that you are proud of and then have noone read it or comment on it. Even disagreement would be fine.

I think the problem stems from wanting to be one of the "big boys" or at least accepted by them. The problem with those big blogs is that they don't really have anything important to say. They go for quantity to keep the people checking back to run up the hit counters. The smaller blogs believe that their words can be used to make a difference and not just a profit. Would I like to make money sitting at my computer bitching? You're damn right I would. But, I would like to think my words are serving a higher purpose than just doing it.

I imagine that more of the smaller blogs will start calling it quits or post less. I would like to be wrong, but don't know if I will be. Poetic Leanings provided insight into New Jersey politics and many of the big issues of today without being pretentious or acting superior to it's readers. I just hope that we can do our part to keep other good bloggers from folding it in.