Seems fitting that my first post of the New Year should be about writing, of all things.

This blogging site, and blogging sites in general, seem to have fallen outside the current definition of "social media." In the eight-plus years I've been writing here, the total population of blogging has fallen off, the regular users even more so, as we've shifted to the shortness of expression that comes with Facebook (which I do use), the even shorter 140-character span of Twitter and the non-verbal world of Pinterest (neither of which I use).  I don't understand Tumblr well enough to even understand what its text limits are.

The New Year has brought a bunch of returns from much-missed people here, some on this site, others RSSing in from elsewhere, all saying, in essence, the same thing: I've missed this.  At least one of my oldest blogging connections has promised a post a day for 2013; others, less ambitious but just as well-intentioned, have talked about talking more in the year to come.

All in all, I did well with content in 2012, only letting 31 days pass without an entry here.  Even rarer was missing two days in a row, or, at most throughout the year, three- and that was at the time of my August Road Trip where access was often limited. That also included some spans of days, even close to a week once, where the DDoS-bombing of LJ was at its worst and I couldn't post if I wanted to.

I didn't participate in yuletide this year, but I kept the community on my friendspage, and it's been nice seeing all the recommendations coming across since the Christmas morning deliveries and, now, the Big Reveals of their authors.  Those also affirm the importance of words over character counts, of plots and their resolutions over just LOLs and pixels.  Books themselves keep changing their formats, and business models, but we're still reading them, and, however frightened you get when I do it, we're still writing them, too.

One never knows, this early in the year, what the Next Big Thing is we'll be talking about throughout its course, but I'm confident that my words, and yours, and those of authors already beloved to us and on their way to such belove, will still be in the conversation when we put 2013 to rest 365 days hence.  And that conversation will still be allowed to exceed 140 characters.

This entry was originally posted at http://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/99136.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.