Personal Blogs in Decline, Facebook (Scarily) Dominant

My wife is an avid Facebook user while I, on the other hand, not only didn't use it...I stopped my account.  She has a whopping number of "friends" on it and the instant communication is, at times, a little frightening.  For example, one day a couple of months ago, after my Ocala Half-Marathon performance, I was sitting in our dining room at my laptop while she was using our desktop a few feet away in the living room.  I decided to check out the on-line Ocala results and found, to my pleasant surprise, that I had finished quite well relative to the other race participants (78th out of 262 total runners, 7th out of 18 in my gender/age group) .  I casually told my wife these exact figures, to which she responding by asking me if I wouldn't mind her bragging on me with them on her Facebook site.  Sure, I said.  I had hardly said so, it seemed, before she began to report several congratulatory comments from her Facebook friends, and even more "likes". These people are really hooked in to this network...and why isn't that so surprising, with the smart phones they carry around with them, alerting them instantly to any change in status in their various e-mail and networking accounts?  In the meantime, hardly anyone reads this blog, and even those whose blogs I used to follow have abandoned theirs.  The amateur, personal blogs have been declining while the "pros" are still out there, doing quite well for themselves.

When I first set out on this blog nearly six years ago, I felt that I was doing something pretty bold, setting out my thoughts in public like this, available for anyone with Internet access to read.  But in that span relatively few people have taken the effort to read any of it, in spite of the fact that my articles, which cover many varied topics, could be reached via search engines.  Now, with my blog's name and URL change, they haven't been available through these engines.  So I am in a relatively isolated position here...especially in contrast to the Facebook users.

I see no reason to end this blog...and I don't want to get into Facebook.  Perhaps at a future date the good people at Google will adjust their search engines and once again allow users to archive older articles of mine that match their search topics.  But for me, this is all ultimately a moot point, for I am doing this primarily neither for networking nor providing information for others.  I am doing this as a personal discipline of writing.  And making my writings publicly available gives me a sense of accountability and causes me to be more careful in expressing myself in a manner that respects and interests any potential reader...