Where Have All the Readers Gone?

Wow! I cannot believe it's been almost 8 months since my last post! I have GOT to do better!

I know what the problem is, though -- it's FACEBOOK. See, once upon a time, I used to share my research discoveries, and other genealogy-related musings, here, or on my less personal, "Genea-Related" blog. For years, I felt a sense of kinship and belonging within a large, supportive group of genealogy bloggers. But, then, two things kinda happened at about the same time, and those concurrent events seemed to work together to lure me (and perhaps many others) from posting (regularly) to our blogs.

In my opinion, the BIG thing that happened was that more and more genealogy groups began to pop up on Facebook. These groups started off with broad-topic ranges, but over time, the groups became more and more specific in scope - categorized in a variety of ways, by ethnicity, location, social/civic involvement, military service, and/or DNA-focused interests. As these groups grew larger in membership, I noticed a decline in the number of comments on, and visits to my blogs. Instead, people drifted over to the instantaneous feedback that Facebook allows, along with its ability for users to engage in "conversation" with each other about, and directly under each post. At first, I was reluctant to join in. After all, I'd been on Facebook since 2007, when I'd joined during my youngest's first year of college, just so I could see some pictures shed wanted to show me. At that time, very few "people my age" were even on FB, but over the next couple of years, my "real" friends began to join, and the site began to serve as a place for sharing pictures and daily happenings with my family and friends.
As time went on, I began to miss the feedback I'd been used to getting when I would post to my blogs. Comments became sparse, to none, and I guess I started feeling like no one was reading. (I know that the purpose isn't supposed to be to entertain others, but we all need a little support, and the feedback was invaluable.) Anyway, I eventually began to poke around in some of the Facebook
groups, and soon, the old,"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" adage won out. So, I dove in, joining groups for the NC counties from which my ancestors hailed, groups for African ancestry, for genealogical societies to which I belonged, and MORE! I began to notice that those people who were still posting on blogs, would publish the links to their posts on Facebook, and all of the commenting was being done there, instead of on the blogs. I became so active, so fast, that genea-matters began to totally consume my feed, and I was hardly ever seeing posts from my original friends. Not only that, I became a bit self-conscious about my hundreds of new "friends" being privy to my personal life, etc., so I decided it best to create a separate Facebook profile, just for genealogy. And, that was all she wrote! :)

The second factor which led to a slowdown in blog-posting, and surely contributed to the decrease in number of readers and commentary, was the demise of the very popular, Google Reader. The majority of us in the blogosphere seemed to have used this platform to organize and deliver the posts of the weblogs we each followed. When Google announced that its Reader was being discontinued, several options were given for new readers to which users could transfer. I chose Feedly; but it just hasn't been the same, and the transfer did not work, 100%. My guess is that this is true for many, and that's probably why we've all lost readers. Also, the interface is quite different, and in order to comment, one must click out of the program, to go,directly to the blog site, and then come back. I also find it frustrating that only small sections of posts open at one time.

So, why am I writing about all of this? Well, honestly, I hadn't planned to. I came here to write a post
about finding my dad's Marine Corps dog tags, but when I saw how long it had been since I'd posted,
I decided to "say something", and it turned into this post.  I'm still going to write that one; and I will share it (and this one) on Facebook (lol), but I'd like to ask just ONE favor of everyone who's actually ready this. Please ma'am, please sir: Just leave me one tiny comment here on the blog. I'd really like to get an idea of who is still even reading, so that I can make some decisions about how I'd like to go forth with my writing. Oh, I am going to renew my commitment to writing, the only question is, "What will my platform be?

Thanks for reading!
Renate