State of the Blog, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I want to work on this blog going forward – and obviously I’ve been thinking about that more than I’ve actually been posting here. Women’s Health News has been around since May 2005, and has always focused on women’s health – but tending to focus on reproductive health and rights, and always with my own kind of feminist take on the politics. The last several years have provided plenty of fodder in that area – the constant churn of anti-woman, anti-choice attacks is a source of material, but it’s also somewhat tiring. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, things get Sebeliused.

The question is, what do I want to get out of it, and am I getting that out of it now, more than 5 years in. I’ve never been doing this for recognition, or to spin into a book deal, or to take over my own corner of some feminist/repro rights blogging empire. I get an amount of traffic I’m happy with. I get fewer comments than I’d like, and wonder about how useful long form stuff or pointing people to important information is when people can get everything, everywhere, in short snippets – or at least feel like they do.

I get some good things out of this – I’ve met a lot of great people, I get to practice forming arguments or compiling information and writing about them in a coherent way, and it forces me to always, always, keep reading and learning.

I’m unwilling and unable to do the kind of constant cross-commenting and link promotion and building stables of bloggers and community bloggers and contests and so on that seems to be part of the slick blogging machine these days.

I don’t know, I think I’m just looking at the new year, and deciding that I either need to stop worrying about not posting some poorly-defined “enough,” or put in the work to post more. I’d like more comments in a click/reshare age, but I’m not sure we’re going back there without more work than I’m willing to put in on building commenters just for the sake of it.

Is it enough to put information out there and hope it’s useful to someone who sees it when they need it? I’m a librarian – you’d think I’d have a firm answer on that subject.

Filed under: Miscellaneous