There's No Blogging Like Slow Blogging

Until the other day, I was convinced that I was not and never would be a trendy person. Some people are—they seem to be wearing the newest fashions before anyone else, or using the latest slang terms or whatever. Not me. I would watch from afar, mulling whether I wanted to participate. Most trends seem not worth it to me—earlobe stretching comes to mind—so I just shrug. Or I'll decide, after about three years, that the once-hot trend is actually worth getting involved in, so I'll sort of sidle over and quietly start doing it.

And that was how blogging was, for me. I was aware of the earliest ones, but I didn't get involved myself until 2005. And when I did, I decided to do things differently—I eschewed the entire media world and just focused on the everyday, the real. I didn't want to talk about Britney or Bush. I wanted to talk about this orchard I go to that has the best Stayman apples anywhere. I wanted to talk about moments when you're hurrying inside on a winter's night and you suddenly notice the stars and just stop, your keys in your gloved hand, looking up at the Pleiades.

And then the other day I'm reading the Times and a headline catches my eye: "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail's Pace." Seems there's a woman who wanders in the Vermont countryside, collecting her thoughts, and then comes home and blogs about things like the icy impressions left in the snow by sleeping deer. And she's part, says the Times, of "a small, quirky movement called 'slow blogging.'" Small and quirky, OK, but still, I did something and then afterward—afterward, mind you—saw that thing in the paper as a trend story! Booyah!

This slow blogging thing obviously (which is slow talk for "obvs") has a lot to do with frequency—they don't like doing 47 posts a day. Slow bloggers like your honored servant prefer longer, more meditative things. And they consider themselves the blogging equivalent of the Slow Food movement, another small, quirky group effort toward which I'm very sympathetic.

I'm mildly concerned about how many of these people blog more and more slowly to the point that they stop altogether. Nor did I see any indication, no matter how hard I read and reread the article, that we're all going to suddenly become surrounded by millions of adoring, money-throwing fans. Actually, one of my fears is that if I walked too much in the countryside I would notice the icy impressions left in the snow by sleeping readers. (Just kidding; according to the article, the blog you are reading now is well above the "more visible" threshold. Thanks!)

The article made another interesting point: For short "check it out" posts which I do have a certain number of myself, the cool kids are all moving to services like Twitter. I'm mulling that over myself. I don't like to rush into these things.