10 Years Old

I was just checking out some of my very oldest posts here on NotSL and realised that a very important milestone for NotSL passed on 10 January 2011: it was NOtSL’s 10th birthday!

Crikey, that means I’ve been blogging in some shape or form for 10 years.

I’m trying to remember what it was like 10 years ago. I was using a CGI script to post updates on my then website, so it wasn’t officially NotSL then; just a small sideline to a personal website highlighting some of my interests at the time: Celine Dion and Kate Winslet among them.

I don’t rightly remember when NotSL first came into existence, although I suspect it was when I was living in a flat in Muswell Hill (A, do you remember?) in 2003-2004. I will check out the Web Archive to see.

When I first started posting, I was just 20 years old and in the middle of my final year of my BA History degree at Swansea. Little did I know where I would be in 10 years time: married with a little boy, a qualified solicitor and a senior manager at a Deaf organisation.

Here’s to the next 10 years!

Is blogging dying?

You will probably notice that I’ve had a bit of a “blogging frenzy” this last week. I posted rather intermittently in 2009, and hardly at all this year – only 8 posts up to last week – and now find myself enjoying posting one again, and following my Stress post, realised how therapeutic it could be.

I was then quite happy to read this article, and it made me realise something.

The reason I’ve hardly posted during the last two years is probably because of my growing utilisation of Twitter and Facebook, where it is far more convenient and less bothersome to say something: short rather than long. But now I see the difference. Cory Doctorow says:

Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else.

That’s interesting. I never really thought of it like that; that I’d abandoned blogging because the bulk of what I would previously post about was actually more suitable for Twitter, and as I’ve said, it’s much quicker to do it on Twitter, as you’re only limited to 140 characters each time.

But then I started to feel that I wasn’t quite able to get things off my chest as much as I’d like. After all, on Twitter you can go “ARGH! HATE [PICK A THING OR SOMEONE]” on Twitter, but you don’t really get the opportunity to elaborate and really say what you want to say.

With blogging, you can. And so here I am!

And no, I don’t think blogging is dying. Perhaps the blogs I used to read regularly have stopped posting – Grumpy Old Deafies and Saltbar are good examples – but there’s probably two reasons for that: (1) they can’t be bothered any more; or (2) they’re tweeting instead. But who’s to say that they won’t start up again? In fact, I URGE them to!

Moblogging

Yep, this extremely old topic resurfaces once more.

You will have undoubtedly noticed that I am actually blogging! Cripes!

The simple reason for this revelation is the iPhone. I was particularly delighted to see that WordPress had developed an app, and that the app allowed access and postings to a multitude of blogs.

That means moblogging has taken on a whole new meaning, and as I’m more likely to post while commuting or bored, it has become so easy to do.

So here I am. Let’s see if I can keep this up …

The limelight

It seems that I have a habit of being thrust into the limelight when I least expect it.

Over the past few weeks, I have been exchanging emails with Paul Crichton (wonder if he’s related to Michael Crichton, the writer), author of the BBC Access 2.0 blog; an “interview” of sorts about the impact of the Internet on the Deaf community and Deaf individuals.

The Access 2.0 article got mentioned over at Grumpy Old Deafies, which turned out to the 10,000th post to be featured on DeafRead. Ain’t that nice? It’s apparently quite “apt” that the first vlogger to post a vlog on the net in sign language gets a mention in the 10,000th post to appear on DeafRead.

This reminds me of the time when I was hailed the world over for being the first sign language vlogger, all the time consciously aware that I’d vlogged in my PJs!