A discussion across blogs with more authority than mine addresses continued interest in blogging. Jeffery Zeldman questioned his “blahg” and his audience’s interest in their own blogs, which resulted in a flurry of responses ranging between passionate and disenchanted. Greg Storey’s suggestion of the loss of craft was highlighted by Matt Linderman’s Signal vs. Noise mention, leading the discussion towards the visual homogeneity RSS feed aggregation encourages.

With the multitude of reasons people publish online it’s inconsiderate to generalize, but in reading through comments a single response kept coming to me:

Stop whining!

The web will always evolve, this should be obvious to anyone playing along. The barrier to entry is low enough so anyone can publish somewhere with minimal effort; my drivel is as easy to post as the next guy’s. If you need to feel you’re still contributing for it to be worth your effort, say something relevant or new, and you’ll hold an audience. Or you’ll at least get it off your chest.

You compete with ad-based sites populated by human or machine with the sole purpose of baiting potential traffic and turning it into advertising revenue, but that doesn’t prevent you from posting, and the Internet has ways of making those ad-focused sites less relevant. Search, be it Google, Technorati, or The Next Thing, is only an effective business model when accurate. The market will in-fact find you, even if it takes some adjusting on its part first.

Oh, I’m sorry, this was about art for you? A post composer in a content tool’s textarea or the repetitive post/comment layout not providing the freedom you need? Be creative and get your hands dirty with your publishing tools, or abandon them altogether — once upon a time we all wrote our own HTML, many of us just got tired of it. If it’s about the creation, there’s nothing stopping you from starting from scratch.

Or is it that RSS allows the ungrateful masses to get away with not even looking at your styled site? Skipping your ad impressions? Their pesky feed aggregators consuming your carefully designed site in plain text? Get over it. If it is that important to you the only way someone can consume your work is visually through the browser, go ahead only share an update notice in your feed, or remove it entirely, but do so at your own risk. With increasing client and web-based aggregators, and even RSS support in the browsers themselves, it’s only getting easier to consume the web by feeds alone. Is what you have to show interesting enough for people to make an exception?

If it just turns out you’re bored with blogging and don’t want to play anymore, fine. Don’t post anything. You don’t owe anyone anything. Someone else will happily take your traffic.

[this frustration-motivated post offers nothing that hasn’t been re-hashed elsewhere]