Jason Calacanis Retires From Blogging, Listen Up Bloggers – This Means Something

In case you haven’t seen it, the big news today is Jason Calacanis’s announcement he has retired from blogging. Now, love him or hate him (I don’t have an opinion, I’ve never met the guy), you have to admit that Mr. Calacanis, as Sarah Lacy says “put professional blogging on the map.” But what really struck me from his article was this part:

"Why now?" [asked] Allen Stern, Center Networks.

That’s complicated as they say on Facebook. Let’s me try and explain my thinking.

First, please don’t take this as a condemnation of blogging. I love blogs and always will. However, I’ve done my part and I’m looking to strip it down. I’m looking for something more acoustic, something more authentic and something more private. Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it.

The "a-list" pressure, the TechMeme leaderboard debates, and constant accusations of link-baiting are now too much of a distraction….

Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it. I’d rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation.

It’s like he hit the nail on the head of everything that’s wrong with blogging today…at least for me. I’ve been blogging since 2001, some of those posts on sites that have long since gone under or whose accounts I deleted long ago. At first, it was a personal, online diary interspersed with bad poetry. (Yes, seriously…*shudder*). As I grew up and grew as person, it evolved. And as I got into technology, my blog became what it is today – a technology site.

It was only a few years ago when me and my fellow bloggers were finding each other through sites like BlogExplosion, and, before that whole thing went south, we were actually having fun. Remember? Sure, sure, traffic exchanges are lame, I know. But that’s what a lot of us did back then – to get discovered, yes, but to discover other sites too. It’s how I met my fellow Grand Effect member, Joe. (Wasn’t it? Well, I know we were both on there anyway.) And then we all got together and hung out. We bar-hopped together and talked about blogging. Now, it seems that all that matters is how many times we’ve been _____________ (Fill in the blank: shared, dugg, linked to, bookmarked). Even us “little guys” who have no intentions of blogging as a business!

And yes, there was a time that I thought that I wanted this little blog to be big deal, too, but that time has passed. Working for ReadWriteWeb now, I see how much work…I mean honest-to-goodness effort, is put into running an “A-List” site, and to be honest, I want none of that for my own blog. I just want to have fun.

I’m running this site as a hobby now and I encourage those of you who feel the same as I do (that blogging is a hobby) to do the same.  That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to have ads – hey, it helps pay the hosting bills (and p.s. did you see the discount on the Twitter t-shirts? wink, wink). But maybe if we stop obsessing over all this nonsense, we can get back to the conversations we used to have. You know the ones? The ones about technology and our passion for it? Yeah those. Not the ones about the unfairness of TechMeme, how the A-List sucks, how many new subscribers we have, etc. etc., etc. I’m over it. And if you write about it, well…I might not unsubscribe exactly, but I’m definitely skipping that post.