Eighteen Years And What Do You Get?

I thought Original Content celebrated its eighteenth anniversary today, but in reality it was March 6th. How did I bungle that? I didn't even do a post on March 6th of this year.*

Fortunately, I hadn't planned to do anything beyond starting to tweet links to posts from the archive again, something I was doing last year and then sort of forgot about. As you can see, I'm not good at pulling off special events, which explains why I'm always complaining here about what an ordeal Christmas is.

What's Happened Over The Course Of Eighteen Years?

Because I started dipping into my past last year, I am aware of some changes that have occurred over the eighteen years I've been blogging:

• One is the decline in engagement, both between bloggers, which used to happen a lot, and between myself and regular readers. I was posting links to posts from 2010 and often came upon real give and take in the comments. Well, maybe not often, but it did happen. It's been years now since I've seen that here. I put this change down to people taking their interaction with others to Facebook and Twitter, where they can just engage with a "like," and the overwhelming number of blogs, leading them to give up on following them altogether. Seriously. The number of blogs is overwhelming, I tell you. I don't read hardly any, anymore, myself. Unless something good is pointed out to me through Facebook or Twitter, of course.
• Another is dead links. I have many, many blog posts that include links that now go nowhere, because whatever I linked to is gone. The blog or site not only is inactive, it isn't being maintained. Keeping up an on-line presence takes endurance. Perseverance. Obsession. Compulsion. Some of those things are marks of my personality. 

Here's a link to my very first blog post, entitled Not Another Self-involved Weblog? (That's another change. Nobody says "weblog," anymore.) If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, (@gail_gauthier), I'll be posting links to the past there regularly. Or maybe not regularly, but sometimes. And I think I might start adding an anniversary link to the bottom of my 2020 posts. A "What was I blogging about on this day in ______?" thing. Yeah, that would be interesting. For me.

And this is why I'm so bad at planning special events. Ideas come to me way too late.

On This Day In 2002: The Answer to a Question You Didn't Ask.

*Update: I know how this happened! I have a work planning calendar (Ha! For what good that does me!), and I wrote "Blog turns 18 years old" on the March 18 date. 18 and 18. A logical mistake, though still inept. And may have been due to rushing.