Bleeding Neon

Do people read blogs anymore? I mean, I guess they do, but do people read my blog anymore? I sometimes feel as though there’s not really a point to it anymore. Unless it’s on Facebook or Twitter, no one really seems to care these days. And that’s fine, I get it, I’ve moved on myself. Maybe we were never as interested in what other people had to say in the first place and were just dying to have them cut it down to 140 characters or less. Maybe all we wanted to do was tag other people in photos of ourselves so they’d come gaze upon our awesome selves. Who knows?

I look back on my Livejournal, which I actively used from 2005 to 2008, and it’s a pretty accurate documenting of my entire life for that period. I’m not sure what makes every other blogging platform I’ve used since shutting that down to the public so much less effective. I suppose it may dovetail with my adoption of Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Maybe it has to do with the loss of Livejournal’s “community” aspect. I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t think what I have to say or do is as interesting anymore on a day-to-day basis. Of course, if that were the case, why would I have updated my Twitter status more than 23,000 times since late 2008?

On the flip side, I’ve noticed my Google Reader, which I use to regularly peruse my favorite blogs and webcomics, doesn’t fill up as fast as it used to. In general, people seem to be blogging far less frequently, and I know I’ve unsubscribed to a number of blogs as time has passed, mainly because I realized I wasn’t ever reading them, either for lack of time or lack of interest.

This isn’t news, of course. A casual web search for “blogging is dead” will return a large number of articles and, ironically, of course, blog posts about the subject. But for me, it leads me to wonder “what’s next?” For a society that seems so obsessed with knowing what everyone is doing at every moment, we seem far less concerned with what those people are actually thinking or feeling. Does this paradigm shift speak to a larger societal issue, that of our dwindling compassion for others? Our collective shrinking attention span? Our inability to invest in anything outside of Lost and reality TV?

Or maybe we’re just bored with blogs. Carry on.

When we come to your town, hide your daughters. And sheep.

Shockingly, I launched a new project two weeks ago and have not promoted it on this blog yet.

We’ll fix that right now.

Pocketful of Awesome is a new, weekly podcast hosted by yours truly and the always-chatty Michael “Mikey Vegas” Willoughby. Because I didn’t have enough to do with the writing and comics and music. Nope, I had to add something else that takes up about six hours a week between recording and editing. But hey, you LOVE MORE PJ RIGHT?

Anyway, the second episode was posted today, and it’s an hour and 35 minutes of, um, two guys drinking and talking politics, music, news, pop culture and really whatever other tangent onto which we derail. The first episode was relatively coherent. This most recent one interrupts a musical segment to talk “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and answers a listener question about little people’s clothes in ways that will surely offend and alienate most of our listeners soon enough, all while Mike and I slowly devolve into slurred giggling fits.

But, hey, if you’re dying to hear my voice every week, well, there it is. Pocketful of Awesome is available on iTunes, where we also recommend you subscribe and rate and review our nonsense.

And that’s all. I’ll probably be back tomorrow to shamelessly self-promote some other stuff with which I’m cluttering the media spectrum.

I’ve been using Twitter for about a year now. When I was first turned on to it, likely by Jason Feinberg, who runs a successful music marketing company (so he should know what’s useful) I didn’t really “get it.” Much like other new users, the novelty of posting and following short non sequitur bursts didn’t make much sense to me. I’m someone who has trouble editing articles to less than 500 words, let alone encapsulating thoughts in 140-character bubbles.

Of course, here we are, 14,000+ tweets and 1000+ followers later, so I guess I figured it out. The thing with Twitter is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Unlike Facebook or blogs or YouTube, Twitter is less a social media service than it is a communications tool, much like phones, fax machines and e-mail. If you want to broadcast one-way messages, you can do it. If you want to engage in conversations, you can do it. If you want to build a community, you can. If you want to link the heck out of the interwebs — well, you get the picture.

I take a multi-part approach to Twitter. I use it to stay in touch with friends, keep up with industries I follow, distract myself when needed, and most importantly, build a community with which I can share my various creative projects without feeling like I’m spamming anyone. It’s for this reason I haven’t followed a million people nor do I try to force myself on new followers.

I’ve run into a wall, recently, however. It feels like, as Twitter grows and so do all of our follower/following counts, there’s becoming too much static in the signal. For most of the people I follow, this doesn’t seem to affect the effectiveness of their communications, for one key reason that I can never duplicate: They are singularly focused Twitter personalities.

Let me explain: Chris Sims, one of the web’s most popular comic bloggers and geek comedy writers, has a very strong following on Twitter as he does everywhere else. But that’s because, even though he dips into comic writing and satirical blogging, everything he does is focused on geek culture. So most of his followers are likely part of that geek culture and therefore dig everything he tweets.

I, on the other hand, depending on which hour of the day you catch me at, play drums in a rock band, write/draw comics, report on music for multiple magazines, cover art for a website, develop web content and social media for companies and am generally regarded as a Las Vegas cultural historian and dude-about-town. And about all of these things I blog, tweet, etc. That means the people who follow me as a cartoonist don’t likely give a damn about the closing of an art gallery in downtown Las Vegas, and concurrently, the Las Vegans who follow me for links, news and commentary on issues related to Sin City may not be into the latest comic from Pop! Goes the Icon. And on it goes.

So even though 1,000+ people follow me on Twitter, I can feel the disconnect between their disparate groups. Now, I have experimented with running multiple Twitter accounts in the past. I set one up for Pop! Goes the Icon early on in my Twitter use. But I found that I was merely duplicating (though not exactly) not only the content of tweets on both accounts, but also the follower base as well. Plus, this was just after I collapsed all of my divergent blogs into one (this one!), and splitting identities on Twitter is hard, especially back then when it was so personality-driven.

So sure, I could set up an account for my band, an account for PGTI, an account for my writing (@BleedingNeon, anyone?) and a personal one for randomness, but I’ve found in best practices, people want to connect with people. They want to identify with someone. They want to connect with someone. And I really can’t imagine maintaining multiple accounts again. It’s hard enough just to manage all of the social media initiatives tied into the music and comics and journalism and external clients and OMG I KNOW RIGHT?

I’m not certain I have a solution — this was really just a mind-dump here, after having a revelation about the interest split amongst my followers. But I do feel that between the changes made to Facebook’s UI (user interface for you non-techies) and the increasing dissonance on Twitter, the whole reason for me being on either in the first place (purely out of networking necessity) is being diminished daily. As communications tools, they still work (I’ve gotten at least five or six gigs I would have otherwise missed through Twitter and Facebook the last year or so), but I wonder for how long.