What Do I Know About Blogging, Really?

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This scene might bring back memories for those of you who've been here before. It's the road into Þingvellir, with the lake appearing as a thin sliver of blue just under the distant mountains on the right side of the photo. It was a very picturesque day! 

A few days after this photo was taken, I found myself at Súfistinn café in the Mál og Menning bookstore being interviewed by a Finnish university student for her thesis on travel blog culture. She found me via Bloglovin' which I'd kind of forgotten about, but which seems to have kept up with the times with a clean new look and streamlined interface. Annika asked
some interesting questions, and I found myself digging deep into the way blog culture has changed over and again in the past 17 years. 

I started my first blog in 2001, two years after Blogger launched. Since then, what a blog is has changed: it's gone from being a wordy, clunky, public diary (which you had to learn html to make any changes to), to being seen as a lame 'old-people's' social club when MySpace, Twitter, and the rest arrived, and then to hard-hitting journalistic platform and savvy media outlet to, finally, being the oversaturated, hack-written, SEO'd marketing machine it is today (I worked as a hack writer for an SEO builder, and was paid pennies to churn out 600-800 word articles with 24-hour turnaround, given only a title and mood to start with. Here and here are two pieces I wrote that were accredited to other people - without my prior knowledge - by the now-defunct company that hired my fingers to type.)

I told Annika, with all due respect to readers who're also still blogging old-timey-style (you know who you are;) that I felt like a dinosaur. And I'm actually ok with that. 

She asked me if I felt that I'd influenced people with this project of mine, and I had to honestly answer yes. I told her about the comments and emails I've gotten from around the world, thanking me for sharing my Iceland,* and how I've been able to answer peoples' questions and even meet some readers for coffee or beer when they've come here to visit. I told her that even though the Reykjavík Museum of Photography (Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur) doesn't consider my photos to be old enough to be promoted by them formally, I do feel like I've kept a visual diary of the city and all the changes its undergone in this crazy last decade that future generations may be thankful for (my friend Ari  - who's been a guest photographer here - at Fótógrafí on Skólavörðurstígur has also done a lot of great work in this area.)

She also noted that a lot of the blogs she got links for were defunct, and I told her that it's been interesting seeing people start blogs, hit the ground running, get a lot of attention, then lose interest or even lose faith in the whole hyper-public social media circus, and all the spam and junk and spew that can go along with it. I don't get a lot of comments given how many readers I have, but I'm very relieved that I haven't gotten lame haters here, or too much comment spam. My blog, has, however, been stolen and republished, without attribution, on at least two click-bait sites. As in, my whole blog...all 700+ posts as far as I can see. Sigh. 

Annika was also curious to know if I'd ever profited from Iceland Eyes, or had ever gotten advertisers. I've of course profited immensely in knowledge-gained and the international contacts (actually, friends!) I've made, and have gotten a few paying research and translation projects to boot through it, have been invited on to the BBC's World Have Your Say live radio show twice and worked with the Tokyo Broadcasting System on a news piece on whaling but nothing more. This way I'm óháð, or non-beholden to anyone. I've never gotten free goodies or any kickbacks for mentioning or linking to businesses or persons like some of these tumblr teens get  (crazy good article on that slice of the internet that you, being over 25, have no clue about. At all.) It made me wonder though about press passes and the like, and if I shouldn't just start aiming at formal journalism. Something to consider.

Meeting Annika, then, was another great bonus for having spent a little over 30% of my life blogging for the (mostly unknown) masses. So here at Iceland Eyes, we'll just keep moving forward into the rainbow-filled future, grateful, one day, one post at a time : )

* Seen through my eyes, hence the name...though I get confused with being an optometrist, or people want to automatically say Icelandic Eyes, so I've thought for years about changing the name. Also, the body parts reference...eyeballs...maybe not so appealing. Alva's Iceland, instead? Maybe. And a move to Wordpress? I'm tempted! More on that later.