There are so many factors. But to me the obvious 5 seem:
0. Blogging is dying. It requires more effort than the 140 characters of a tweet, text message, or status update to both write and consume. There is nothing stopping people from posting short blogs, but it seems hardly worth it to come up with a title when you are only posting a sentence.
1. The biggest factor - Facebook. Facebook overtook the internet by rekindling people's relationships with their friends, families, and even the person they hung out with for a week at a 3rd grade camping field trip. With a social network of the people you are already comfortable with, and the promise of all of your friend's friends, there isn't much need to try and start fresh with new people or go anywhere else. Because of the very same scenario, an "author" on facebook receives so much more positive feedback from the people that already care about them. To me it seems like the difference between going to a party at your best friends house and meeting a few new people and going to a bar alone where you know nobody.
2. A lot of my good local friends moved away.
3. I have no free time. Between work load, house work and some other issues, I "withdrew from being social" in general. I think I can count the people I actually talk to one one hand. Promoting the site was a big part of getting new writers. Well, that and back then there were few outlets for posting information publicly to the web.
4. I refuse to make an iphone app. In fact, I totally gave up on apple right as they became most popular. Hopefully, the switch to android - which I much prefer - will pay off someday. At least I can now be hired as an android programmer if I need a job ever. But seriously, I refuse to pay $100 to become an iphone dev, when I cannot program it on linux and I have no way of knowing if apple will even accept my app. As you can see from my date cloud in the left column, I have been publishing much more since I got the nexus one than I did 2007, 2008, 2009 with the iphone. Having a native app is easier, especially since stupid fucking apple did not include file upload in their shitty browser to force people to buy into their store.
Just check of my august's for comparison:
Sometimes I wish I had focused on estrip more instead of going the corporate job route, but ultimately I could have totally failed - especially considering the economy - and instead now at least I have a great job.
Its still sad to watch it die out. I guess thats really how everything goes. On the other hand I met so many interesting people, had so many fun experiences and learned so much from it.
All that being said, I personally don't plan on stopping to document my life here or anything, and estrip is going nowhere - so if you are in for the long haul, estrip will be here for you.
And who knows, maybe it will bounce back. Then again not even my own brother (e:mike) writes on it anymore. I guess he doesn't really have his own computer. Maybe I should just re-purpose the software for something else and make a new site in something I am interested in like a tortoise owner journaling site or a linux user journaling site.
I wonder if this is how the WELL
people felt after people started going other places online. They were my original inspiration for this although, instead of bringing people together from all over the world, I wanted to bring strangers together from the same place.Total entries per year for the site. 04 was really the best year of all.
The thing with Facebook is one of the reasons why it took off so much is because of other sites.... What I mean by that is most sites now have a way to share content on Facebook. Sometimes it is a link and sometimes it is a picture or a full story.
I also think that there are a few buffalo blog sites not sure what they are really.
I think people would blog if they knew what to blog about. Didn't you have for a bit of time some restaurant review site. I wonder if there was a sing out side a place that said "How Was the Food?" "Tell Others at (e:strip).org" if people would write a review and if that would lead to other blogs. Maybe a sign out side a gallery that said "how was the art show" "Tell others at estrip.org" if people would find the site. Or you could go really guerrilla (this might cause some problems so check before this is done). Hide some flyers inside of Artvoice that would pertain to the part of the paper it was in. Of course you can't put it in all of them just random ones.
Point being I think people will write blogs you just have to find those people....
I am swimming in uninteresting right now and have been for so long. The stuff that goes on in my life is just so banal that I don't think it is worth sharing. All I seemed to do in Buffalo was work at city hall and work on campaigns with a few odd months here and there to languish in horrible, horrible freedom. Blah. Who cares about either of those things? Now, I just work work work and haven't had time to enjoy things worth blogging about. It isn't you, estrip, it is me. My life is too boring to tell you anything.
It is more that I am not interested in blogging in general than it is to do with estrip. I still love checking in here and seeing how everyone is doing. But, I don't even post much on facebook or twitter.
I am hoping that when a new job comes my way and I have more personal freedom I can find more interesting things to share.
I think the Buffalo News did write an article on (e:strip) a while back. I really like FB because I can easily upload local articles from other websites that I find interesting. The iPhone copy and paste function doesn't work well enough to do that quickly on (e:strip). Anyway to share an article on estrip through email? Maybe if I get a new phone someday...
Well, I am still not on FB, but I have noticed I don't write as many journals anymore. I think when I was in school my life was more interesting because of the things I was studying and that I had more free time. I sort of wish I had a phone like yours just so I could share all the things I want to share but is usually too much work because I need to bring a camera and then download them, etc.
I think estrip is amazing and am really impressed at the improvements. Still, lots of people are not aware. I think if someone wrote an article in the Buffalo News or Artvoice about you that it would help. I would be really impressed if the Buffalo News did a piece about it.
I think it is part of the ebb and flow of things. I don't think it's dying out at all, just leveling off a little bit. All the venues from Myspace to twitter to foamspring (whatever it's called) to even facebook are sort of cyclical in a way. I think what drew us all in, will always be there. Sometimes, you just have to work a little harder to find your way back. I still read daily and ain't stopping anytime soon.
You should.
Hmmm... should I continue to harass you all after I move from Bufalo? Is that what you are saying? Oh well. Just remember. You brought this on yourself!
I'm sad too myself, but for personal reasons. I'm glad that the site will be around for the diehards like myself. Just don't sell the place out to the Russians as what happened to Livejournal.
In the very least this place got me back together with a guy form the UK that I meet 13 years ago in Florida that now lives in Japan.