Reflections on tenth anniversary

My blog reaches its tenth anniversary tomorrow: over ten years, I have published 572 blog posts at a frequency of approximately once a week.

My first genuine blog post (not counting a test post and a “coming soon” post) on March 29, 2005 was about an Argentine creditor (NML Capital) trying to persuade a US federal judge (Thomas Griesa) to attach some bonds issued by Argentina. The idea that a debtor’s liabilities (rather than its assets) could be attached struck me as funny. Ten years on, NML and Argentina are still battling it out before Judge Griesa, but things have moved from the comic to the tragic (at least from the Argentine point of view).

The most fruitful period for my blog (as for many other blogs) was the global financial crisis and its aftermath. The blog posts and the many insightful comments that my readers posted on the blog were the principal vehicle through which I tried to understand the crisis and to formulate my own views about it. During the last year or so, things have become less exciting. The blogosphere has also become a lot more crowded than it was when I began. Many times, I find myself abandoning a potential blog post because so many others have already blogged about it.

When I look back at the best bloggers that I followed in the mid and late 2000s, some have quit blogging because they found that they no longer had enough interesting things to say; a few have sold out to commercial organizations that turned these blogs into clickbaits; at least one blogger has died; some blogs have gradually declined in relevance and quality; and only a tiny fraction have remained worthwhile blogs to read.

The tenth anniversary is therefore less an occasion for celebration, and more a reminder of senescence and impending mortality for a blog. I am convinced that I must either reinvent my blog or quit blogging. April and May are the months during which I take a long vacation (both from my day job and from my blogging). That gives me enough time to think about it and decide.

If you have some thoughts and suggestions on what I should do with my blog, please use the comments page to let me know.

Posted at 3:50 pm IST on Sat, 28 Mar 2015         permanent link

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