Blogging sucks or: no, it doesn't, not exactly

I started blogging in early 2001 and eventually, by 2005, I was making a living at it. Sometime in 2009 or so I began to hate it.

The reasons for that hate are many and sort of picky and it's pointless to outline them here. My hatred of blogging had way more to do with me and my own personal issues than anything else.

I kept up some Tumblr blogging and that was fine... but it never felt quite like blogging. Tumbling feels like toy blogging to me--even though I sincerely love many things about Tumblr, a lot. I have at least one Tumblelog I'll make it a point to maintain from here on out, in fact.

I feel like the first kind of blogging I did, though, is where I'm most comfortable. Not truly crowd-sourced blogging, aiming at a certain limited audience's approval, but an endeavor that's one guy or gal's thing, for them to take wherever the hell they want.

I've tried niche blogging--made my career at it, in fact, in crime blogging--but each time I've tried to renew that on my own, it has felt false. I have more than one interest and my interests cycle constantly. I want a blog space where I can just write about whatever and do it at length, if I want--and not feel like anyone who follows the blog regularly on a blog dashboard (Blogger has one now, the dashboard is key to the Tumblr experience) is going to be annoyed if I just go off for a few thousand words. That'll happen regardless, but something about the Blogger setup makes it feel like less of an impediment.

Here's what I'm gonna do with my other blogs--two Posterous blogs will stay as is, but one will essentially just have duplicate entries of stuff you'll find here because Posterous's interface for a certain type of quick-draw blogging beats everything out there. My Daily Huff Tumblr will probably go dark. My niche Tumblr, The Occultist, will be updated regularly--it's too much fun. Those posts won't be cross-posted here.

From here on out, my most active web address will be this one (and Them Twitters, of course). I may redirect the Daily Huff URL to this spot but I'll make that decision later. The point is this--I will only be actively blogging on my own (not being paid by someone) at two addresses (to be clear: here and The Occultist Tumblr) and tweeting at another. I might pop in on Facebook once in a blue moon, too.

As for content here--if you're accustomed to me crime blogging, you may find some of that. But that is not the primary purpose of this blog--hence the broad term "Big" in the blog title. I'm in many respects an extremely non-serious dude and that may be reflected here as well. On rare occasions I talk about politics--very rare. I've carved kind of a career out as a newsblogger, too. So definitely some newsblogging will take place.

Maybe going back to Blogger as opposed to sticking with newer platforms like Posterous, Tumblr or Wordpress is old-fashioned in the Internet scheme of things, but you know, at 43, I'm fine with that. Blogger permits users to do some things many of these other sites don't and I'm conversant enough with the setup to have no problem with that.

So--here we go.