April 11, 2002

  • 3 ~~ The Third Great Trap of Xanga ~~ 3


     


    Another impression that one may come to warmly cuddle with after a short-term of blogging in Xanga is that the community that initially embraces you will endure.  In the short run, the initial familiarities seem perfectly resident.  No one much seems to go anywhere.  In fact, it becomes amazing to behold how regularly “all of us” keep coming back. 


     


    Don’t worry.  Relax.  If Xanga withstands, a community will, indeed, always give thee context.  But clearly, in the long run, it will not be the same blogging community that welcomed you out of the gate. 


     


    None of us are really “old-timers” here. Outside of the founders, i.e., John, marc, monsur, dan, et.al., the earliest hoard of us bloggers arrived here December 2000—only 1 ¼ years ago.  Yet even upon so short a baseline, active membership has radically changed.  Not only are a great many of the earliest most active and high-profile bloggers gone,  the influx of new bloggers is so intense that it’s easy to get lost.  Unless you drill regularly through your SIR (Sites I Read) list, and your subscribers through theirs, you can find yourself losing touch with some once-a-time blogging intimates as rapidly as a clique of “best buddies” going forth their separate ways into the endless summer from a high school senior graduating class.


     


    And as Xanga gets bigger, staying in touch with everyone will get harder.  Imagine a couple of years from now when Xanga membership is 50x its current (60K or 70K?) or around 3 million, you have 2 or 3 thousand subscribers, and your average blog is getting about 200 comments a day.  Without some sort of comment autoresponder (which would be abhorrently impersonal), how will you ever keep up reciprocally?


     


    In the long run, if all goes well, count on two things: growth and change.  The regular appearance of ever numerically-increasing newly-arising generations of bloggers.  And watching a good many of your steadfast very favorites like VeryModern just disappear.

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