Socially|Mundane

I've been thinking about allowing Common|Sensible blog to lapse. Retire and fade away slowly and quietly. I mean, this happens all the time, right? Besides, there's something like six-times the number of blogs about Second Life than there are about World of Warcraft so I am not so sure it will be missed. I was cleaning-up my Blogger Dashboard as I prepared this blog for resurrection. (I "own" a couple dozen blogs or so, but only show a few in my Google Profile. Kind of like hiding groups in your SL profile. Go figure.)

One of the really slick features of Blogger is the ability to "follow" other blogs, much like "following" in Tumblr. However, on Tumblr, you can 'follow' other Tumblr blogs only, whereas on Blogger you can "follow" any blog or news site or even web site for that matter.

"Following" on Tumblr places new posts on those blogs into my endless dashboard over there, including posts from my own Tumblr blog. With a Google Account (and a Blogger Dashboard) you get the same thing. So I looked at all those blogs I added to my Blogger "follow" list more than a year ago. 46 of them and all SL-related (I had 'unfollowed' 3 or 4 before I took the screenshot here.) Hell, I have even been following Second Life News Network (SLNN for all you oldbies out there) - where I first discovered Tateru Nino's writing - which has been rolled into Massively as long as I have been blogging.

I decided it was time to review and clean that list-up. Of the 46, only 30 of them are still posting anything within the last 90-days and a majority of those stale ones don't even exist any more.

The roll-over in SL-related blogs seems to be quite high. Not those that are irritatingly riddled with advertising like New World Notes and Massviely as those are all about making money. But rather all the home-grown blogs that were started with passion and good intention for no reason other than sharing their own SL experience. No advertising or intentional sensationalism to get more readers and all that.

Common|Sensible is one of those.

Seeing all those "dead" and stagnent bogs in my Dashboard clean-up is more or less what led me to the decision to retire Common|Sensible, something that has been crossing my mind over the last few months, anyway.

The domain for "CommonSensible.net" expires in April 2010. I don't intend to renew it. I do intend to make my last post there on December 31st, 2009. In fact, it's already written and post-posted, scheduled to go 'public' at the right time. Then it sits quietly... perhaps as a simple historical record or something wishful-thinking like that. However, I do not intend to let all those posts die, so I will be exporting all that stuff from there and importing it all into here at this blog, including comments if I can. From then-on I intend to more or less focus on this mundane bog as my main and only - even allowing my AriBlackthorne.com to revert back to the default at Tumblr.

Think of it more as a simple metamorphosis. Common Sensible (and this blog before resurrection) was and is 100% Second Life-related, and mostly from a "big-picture" perspective. Well, this blog was also up until the "resurrection" notice posted previous to this one. The metamorphosing is sort of from "all things Second Life, Big Picture" to "All things Second Life...and other stuff, often on a more intimate level". There still will be "big picture" stuff, just not as the main "theme".

I was my goal to make Common|Sensible a "big picture" blog about SL as there really aren't that many. Very few "big picture" blogs about Second Life explicitely even exist: New World Notes, Massively (SL category), Metaversally Speaking; albeit not always and then there's (/me shivers) the sensationalistic AlphaVille Herald and Shopping Cart Disco (which is Drama-Queen Headquarters and mostly lives in the "fashion" world.) There may be others I'm not aware of, to be sure and Linden Lab blogs don;t count.

I suppose there will be one less.

And I still refuse to acknowledge, respect or otherwise accredit the alphabet letters of "S" and "L" placed contiguously as "SL" to be any kind of "trademark," legal or otherwise for anyone, including and especially to Linden Lab unless and until there is a specific design description and requirement to go with it.

So I was never really looking to lead in the "Big Picture" category of SL-related blogs . And I certainly don't want to follow.

I suppose I'll just get out of the way.