Blog-gevity
April 30, 2018 § 15 Comments
It’s a jungle out there, a blog-eat-blog world where only the strong survive. Over the years I have seen many come and go, and each day, frankly, is a new day over here at the California Division of Cycling in the South Bay. Were it not for my six paid subscribers, I’d have packed it in a long time ago.
What’s astonishing is how few long-running cycling blogs there actually are, depending, of course, on what you mean by “blog.” In their infancy, blogs were digital diaries written on a more-or-less daily basis by a sole author and directed at a relatively small audience. But what happened was predictable:
- Most died, unable to meet the crushing pressure of daily, or even weekly deadlines.
- Those that survived did so by becoming online magazines with multiple writers, photographers, and ad sales departments.
There are notable exceptions such as Bike Snob NYC, DC Rainmaker, and Dave Moulton’s Blog, but the single-grape varietal that gets picked, pressed, casked, vinted, bottled, and daily carried to market on a donkey cart seems pretty much over.
Cycling in the South Bay has been published continuously since 2011, with this issue being #1883. I’ve published a handful of guest posts, probably less than ten. The rest of the manure pile is mine, all mine. I didn’t know it when I started, but it turns out that my hero is Karl Kraus and his legendary publication record of Die Fackel, one man doing it all from 1899 to 1936, and even more incredibly, just as angry when he started as he was when he finished.
I had a conversation with a friend last night who asked me how I came up with topics.
“That’s easy,” I said. “I open a screen and start typing.”
Actually, I didn’t say that. I don’t remember exactly what I said as I was already on my fourth glass of craft water, but it was something like this: “Every day I wake up with the realization that I have to write something on that stupid fucking blog. So I try to pay attention during the day so that when something pops up I can nab it before it slips away, like one of Socrates’s fleeting words which always seemed to flit away just before he could nail down its meaning.” [I totally added in the Socrates part just now.]
And I guess the other two things, not so strangely, are reading and riding. The more I read and the more I ride, the easier it is to blog. Fortunately, I don’t have to read very much about cycling, and perhaps even more fortunately, I don’t have to cycle while reading.
What’s also interesting is that the blog format, which promised to be a free space where talented people could let loose with only the finest prose, unencumbered by page limits, nasty editors, rejection slips, publishing house politics, agents, and over-the-transom submissions, turned into a horrible 6′ x 9′ sunless room where people who thought they had something to say realized that they did, and once said, THAT WAS IT.
I’m one of them, I suppose. I just haven’t realized it yet.
END
One writer. Day in, day out for seven years. Bike politics, bike racing, bike training, Viennese coffeehouses, China adventures, home coffee roasting, it’s all here. Please consider subscribing … Click here and select the “subscribe” link in the upper right-hand corner. Thank you!
Cycling in the South Bay 
Triffic blog Seth ,
Now you have seven .
Hope that helps keep you in di2,tubbies,carbon ,full carbon ,and every think else you need to keep your wonderful stories coming.
Let me know if you need another book to read ,I have three and have
Read them all.twice.
They better have pictures I can color.
Six?
Barrel bottom scraping: blogging about blogging… 😍
Same reason that movies about making movies always bomb. Worst of all: Books about people who write books.
Read. Ride. Write. Repeat.
Yep!
Write on Seth… write on!
If we can hang onto that First Amendment thing a bit longer!
You still haven’t told us the story behind the red bike wrapped around the post at Hawthorne and Ravenspur.
It was a dark and stormy night …
I haven’t been doing it nearly as long or as successfully as you have. As the promises of blog-related fame and riches have so far failed to materialize for me, I have come to realize that at a certain point all blogs have a lifecycle. Sooner or later the author loses interest in entertaining an audience that may number in the tens (when you deduct the spambots). Whatever compelled the creation of the blog is somewhat less compelling. Life moves on.
That said, I enjoy reading whatever you put out there. It is appreciated and anticipated. Perhaps that says something about your audience, anxiously looking forward to the latest entry from a guy named “Wanky.”
Thanks! They do indeed have lifespans!
Interesting how you have been going at this for 7 years. This came up; Sabbatical: a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked..
It’s a great idea, but I could never do it! I actually started a blog in 2008 but killed it in 2011, starting CitSB later that year.