I used to use in the old days when I surfed more. I used to look around the other blogs. I don't even look at Arts and Letters any more. That's the problem with Twitter links - it gives some great links, but it eliminates the older kind of blog surfing

Two reasons why blog surfing has gone by the wayside: 1) There aren't as many amateur blogs left, 2) and, related to the first, almost everyone went to Patheos and Aleteia, neither of which is as enjoyable because of ads and because the "atmosphere" is so monolithic. And, besides, who wants to listen to a bitter person's latest rant about the evils of the pro life movement?

Ah! I remember the good old days of 2002!

No, I don't use it.

Indeed, this one is, Janet!

I very rarely read blogs at all, professional or amateur. I read this one, Craig's, and Gladsome Lights. I am about to be unemployed for a time and I have been thinking about writing my blog again, but then I wonder why. I think it's because I just want to write.

AMDG

I have lots to say, too. Early on in my establishment of this blog my wife made sport of "people who think the world needs to know what they think about everything." I was not deterred. It really does take some will power to keep posting fairly regularly, and I think her diagnosis is actually not too far off from the reason I keep doing it.

And yet, like the rest of you, I don't wander among blogs anymore. I guess Craig's and Neo-neocon are the only ones I'm at all consistent about now. Neo posts at least once a day Monday through Saturday, usually more than once, and it's almost always something of substance. I think she treats it more or less as a job, and doesn't have an actual go-to-work job to keep her from it.

Other sites that I visit regularly may be called blogs but are associated with magazines. They're not just obscure-regular-person-at-home blogs of the sort which flourished for a while.

Like others, I used to use it occasionally but now no longer do. I think Facebook is as much to blame as anything: my friends provide me with lots of links to randomly interesting stuff, without me going looking for them when I have time to spare.

I like Aleteia very much aside from a woman named Hernandez

Aleteia is definitely the better of the two.

Patheos pays their writers (= why so many writers go there), and they make that money back by being an advertising cesspool.

I never use the sidebar links; I typically read (skim if I’m honest) in my RSS reader, so I never see them.

But Google uses incoming links as part of its method for determining a page’s search rank. So if you get rid of the sidebar you might negatively affect those blogs’ visibility in some small way.

I occasionally use it as a shortcut to one of the other sites if I'm on here already, but it's rare.

Cross-posted with Rob--my first sentence was in reply to Janet.

I do a fortnightly blog on the web edition of a magazine and the pay is miniscule.

The current one is great.

It was a joke.

AMDG

Thanks for the compliment. I have stopped writing on my blog because a) I have small children now, and b) I’m in the middle of a several years-long project to redesign it and power it with code that can periodically spit out printed books as well (more info at this hidden article: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.html (no that’s not what the redesign will look like)). I don’t mean to shill my stuff here, but in case you would find it convenient (and only because you seem interested) I have an email newsletter signup at the main site, which will be the first place I announce whenever I finally do get things revved up again.

Anyway, all that to say, I like blogrolls and am considering how to try and incorporate them in a fresh way. If blogs ever do claw their way back to relevance (or people rediscover them after Facebook and Twitter go the way of CompuServe and MySpace), having those brambly old paths preserved somewhere might prove to have been a good idea. Maybe it doesn’t need to live in the main sidebar, just paste it into its own post or put it somewhere else for safekeeping.

Regarding Grumpy's pay for the magazine blog: I don't know how they calculate things like that. With a print magazine that people pay for, you have at least some kind of orientation or framework for putting a dollar figure on a writer's work. But with the whole everything-is-free mentality on the web, you either get income from advertising, or if you're a non-profit that doesn't want to plaster its site with junky advertising, you put stuff out there because it's your mission, and/or because you hope people will subscribe to your magazine, or something. So I guess web-only "content," as they call it, would be something you just want to spend as little as possible on.

I think it may have been someone from Huffington Post, or some similar site, who told a would-be writer that "paying for content is not part of our business model."

Pretty shabby way of letting you know.

At one time Patheos Catholic blogs were all over the place theologically. I don't really have any idea whether that's still true or not. But there does seem to be a contingent of people who are annoying in ways similar to the one Robert and I referred to earlier. I know that because I've "overheard" conversations with them on Facebook.

Most of the advertizing is so mis-targetted it is not a real distraction for me. I bought a long tee-shirt dress from American Giant, to take on the camino and use as a night dress in the youth hostels. I thought it would be lighter than carrying tee-shirts and shorts, which is what I've slept in on the camino for years. I thought for weeks about how to make my pack lighter, because of the accident with my knee in February and treating a tee-shirt dress as a nightshirt worked. But now of course I am constantly chased by other images from American Giant - hoodies, running trousers - endless images of people in athletic clothes. The thing is, I don't wear athletic clothes like hoodies. I look hideous in them. Its just an example, but I feel as if I'm chased round the web, not so much by my wardrobe as by the wardrobe someone else mistakenly thinks I would like. And that's good, in a sense, because its not a real distraction. I don't want a hoody.

Well, Bill and I share the same Kindle account and he really would get annoyed when bras showed up on the side of his Facebook page.

AMDG

Surely that tactic went out with the Sears catalog. They can see more now at Sports Illustrated, to say nothing of actual pornography.

For some reason Facebook decided for a while that I needed new underwear and kept showing me ads that to a non-gay male were a bit distasteful. I finally discovered the "stop showing me stuff like this" capability.

I feel ever so slightly guilty about that. I mean, some reasonable amount of advertising is acceptable, and a big-time web site is a very expensive thing that has to be paid for somehow. And it feels a bit like cheating to stop the ads from being displayed at all. But the ones that richly deserve being suppressed are the ones that snatch away what you're in the middle of reading and replace it with an ad. I don't put up with that. When a site does that I close the tab and go on to something else.