Wednesday, January 07, 2009

My Ego Is Bigger Than Your Ego

I guess I should introduce myself. I am Smotlock to the internet, Shane to my friends and family.

A couple of weeks ago my old online journal/blog of over five years bit the dust along with everything else at Journalspace.com. I lost five years worth of my own special brand of insanity, translating into over a thousand pages of random stuff and nonsense. I also lost thousands of comments from readers (for the second time) that once meant a lot to me. Well, some of them anyway.

I hadn’t really been writing on Journalspace much lately, but it was always nice to know that any time I wanted to look up something I’d written in the past, I could just click over to the site and do a search within my own blog to find it.

I had this Blogspot journal up from way back, probably the first time Journalspace looked like it was about to go belly up. It always seemed on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the site owner’s ego. Or perhaps my own.

So for the time being this is going to be the place where you get to hear me whine about the shit I loathe and rave about the shit I love, when my allergy to effort is not flaring up.

I’ll probably be moving some stuff that used to be on the old Journalspace site in the hopes new readers will find it here for the first time on a real blogging site. Although, realistically speaking, blogging has been a dying fad since 2004 and I doubt very many people will ever read this. Nor do I care if you want me to be completely honest.

I just really like hearing myself speak.

My old Journalspace blog got over 250,000 hits in its five year lifespan. I know that’s not a lot compared to the really popular sites that get millions of hits in a week, but for a tiny backwater place like Journalspace it wasn’t too bad. I think only a handful of online journals on that site got anywhere close to that number.

While I’m bragging about past accomplishments, from 2003 to 2004 I consistently had the most read blog on Journalspace. That said, being famous on Journalspace was a lot like being famous on the moon. No one still knew who the fuck I was and I didn’t get rich and get lots of groupies. I only got a few groupies and I remained poor and unloved by the masses.

But now I’m here on Blogger where the potential audience is far greater than anything I ever had on Journalspace.

I will say this about this site. I really love the term followers.

Follow me, internet.

17 comments:

Indantatia said...

Fuck. Now I want to un-follow you. You make everything less appealing.

Smotlock said...

What? Was it something I said?

Here, drink this kool-aid, it will make you feel better.

Simon Butler said...

I got over 400,000 hits – but 99% of those were Google Image searches for ‘breasts’, so it doesn’t really count. It doesn’t have quite the same intellectual cachet anyway.

greeneyes67 said...

I'm so glad you're here. I've always enjoyed your entries. Your sarcasm is contagious. Love it.

TheLubeFaerie said...

Other than my ex, you were the first blog I ever read on JS. You made me laugh. It was an entry about kittens.

BonnieBehave said...

Well, at least you are consistently full of yourself! I hate wishy-washy people who can't commit to a course of action.

Anonymous said...

Holy crap, Journalspace went poof!

To be honest, I'm kind of relieved to see that my peddiewolf and ieatbugs accounts are gone. I've been meaning to delete them forever, and now Dylan's ineptitude appears to have done it for me.

What's the skinny on what happened? Did he even bother to explain it this time, or did he just pitch a fit when people dared to criticize his gigantic suckitude?

Hey, you on Twitter at all? Or does microblogging annoy you?

Smotlock said...

I've never used Twitter but I'm aware of it. Is it fun?

Micro-blogging seems like it would be something akin to chatting, only with more delay.

As for Tiro/Dylan he actually blamed Journalspace's hard drives getting wiped on a malicious ex-employee. You knew he wasn't going to take responsibility.

And, man, the new Journalspace using Wordpress sucks because it doesn't have any of the features I liked about Journalspace.

Can you believe someone paid 6000 dollars for that domain name? That's fucking nuts.

AHinMaine said...

Just noticed our blogs bit the dust too. I (ohans) managed to rescue most of my entries at least. Google cache to the rescue. pita...

Anonymous said...

Twitter is fun.

I don't think it's necessarily comparable to chatting. You can certainly use it to talk back and forth with people, but I think it really is closer to blogging, in many ways.

Like blogging, it's largely pointless. The fact that posts are limited to 140 characters tends to emphasize the pointlessness of a lot of entries. That said, there are countless instances of businesses and people using Twitter to really innovative and fascinating effect. The Obama campaign got a lot of press for their utilization of Twitter.

I just use it to post whatever random shit amuses me. Typically, thoughts that weren't worth putting into an email to someone.

I was disdainful of the whole concept when I first heard about it, and now I gleefully partake in the inanity. Especially since it's so easy to post things using my iPhone.

Anyway, if you ever set up a Twitter account, I'm @diddywiddit.

Anonymous said...

it was nice to find your blog-darkcloud Jonny-when JS died I had already going other blogs-I pasted in JS what I wrote in my LiveJournal blog-peace

Smotlock said...

Good to see you here, Jonny.

Anonymous said...

Hi. It's Lien.

Karen said...

I have been reading you off and on for 7 years. Just how I love Chuck Palahniuk (thanks to you), I get much pleasure out of your writing style and thoughts whether I agree with them or not. Sad to see I cannot find any recent work from you, but understand at the same time.

Smotlock said...

Hi, Karen. Thanks for the kind words. Most of my current internet writing can be found via Twitter under Smotlock.

If you want to read some longer writing though I'm now getting published in a local alternative paper named Bazooka. Here's a link where you can download the issues.

http://www.bazookamagazine.com/downloads.html

I just started writing for the paper so I only have rants in the two newest issues which are June and July 2010 so those would be the issues to download if you want to check out my latest writing.

Smotlock said...

Oh, and the rants are under my real name Shane Matlock rather than my internet pseudonym Smotlock.

Anonymous said...

I must digg your post so more folks are able to see it, very helpful, I had a hard time finding the results searching on the web, thanks.

- Thomas