Ten years

This blog turns ten today. Some say blogs were born in 2005 and died in 2006 with the arrival of Facebook and the social media boom.

The truth is that by 2008 many Chilean bloggers had already quit. In Chile, out of the “Cambrian blogging explosion” of 2005, and in particular in the phylum of personal tech blogs, I think the only survivors are Alejandro Barros, whose blog turned ten in June, and me. Although I admit that Alejandro has kept up a more regular publishing schedule.

Right now this site has 948 published posts. My books, “La Naturaleza Del Software”, “Los Enigmas de Turing” and “Akarrú”, add up to more than 850 copies sold on Amazon, which makes me very happy. To all of you who have bought my books, I want to say thank you for choosing them.

And of course thanks to all of you who keep visiting this blog.

Evolution

530 million years ago, in the Cambrian period, there was an explosion of life in which countless kinds of species appeared that, if they were alive today, would look very strange to us. But in one of those mass extinction events that have ravaged our planet, more than 90% of those species disappeared.

A lot has changed since 2005, when we had our Cambrian period in blogging. Today very few of us are still blogging, running a personal blog. Some blogs turned into professional media outlets, but the vast majority disappeared.

I remember a lot of people would write a first post announcing their intention to publish something every week; two weeks later they published a post apologizing for not having published, and promising posts again. The third post never came, of course.

Someone said that if your life was very interesting you didn’t have time to write a blog. That’s a fallacy, of course. You can have a very interesting life and blog.

Many of you post your ideas on Facebook, and when you do you are blogging. Your comments on Twitter make you a microblogger. Or if you post a video on YouTube you are video blogging. Just as happened with life on this planet, blogs did not go extinct, they just turned into new species. That is called evolution.

As “la Mercedes” (Mercedes Sosa) sings, everything changes, but my love doesn’t change, no matter how far away I am. Although I don’t write as often as I used to, the urge to write is still there.

Again, thank you all. I hope we keep seeing each other for ten more years.