As you probably know by now, my time here is limited and I may not continue to write for much longer. Mostly everything that you read on this website and on my xanga site were written during times when I had some free time to spare, and unfortunately, increasingly less of that precious time is being made available to me. Although I've always enjoyed writing during my spare time, I may have to sacrifice this habit in order to devote more of my time towards other areas of my life that are far more important in the long run. The lack of time to continue writing is currently the largest obstacle that I have to deal with. Being faced with this and a multitude of other problems, what will the future have in store for the Randomblog?
I suppose that age plays a significant role in one's ability to find the time to write, but I've always believed that age should have no business when taking how well one writes into consideration. Although it may seem that being young is a good quality for a writer to have because he or she may have greater potential and stick around longer, this isn't exactly true. During my earlier years as a teenager, I learned that people wouldn't take you seriously if they knew that you were young. Luckily, that kind of treatment no longer applies to me as I'm soon about to reach an age in which I'll no longer be able to call myself a teenager. Writing to a group of people who are noticeably younger than I am also makes me feel as if I'm not a part of the young crowd anymore, but even then, I still feel quite young when I look at the Featured Content listings and realize that all of the "regulars" are older than I am. As we get older, I know that there will be a day when we'll no longer have the time to do the activities that we once enjoyed doing, but it seems that these people are still able to find the time to update their xanga sites regularly. What I don't know is how these mothers, fathers, and college students are able to find the time to do so given the busy lifestyle that they must have. I mean, it can't be easy to do this while balancing a busy life with school, work and/or taking care of children among other things. I assume that they do a good job of managing their time, and it just so happens that I have a very long way to go in terms of being able to do this properly.
Changes will inevitably happen to my blogs as long as I continue to write. Comparing my latest blogs with ones that I've written more than a year ago, it's not too hard for me to see that change is evident. For one thing, my writing style has changed significantly, but the concept of my xanga site is still rather much the same and I expect it to remain this way. Although I certainly don't intend for changes to occur, I suppose that this is something that naturally happens as one gets older. And for that reason, what I choose to write about on my xanga site will change as I get older. I won't be the same person as I am now and the content of my blog is likely to be a bit different in the future when I can no longer come up with good things to write about.
Even then, it's quite unlikely that I'll run out of things to write about anytime soon. I have enough ideas to write about until the end of 2007 and am still coming up with new ideas every week. However, I've thought about the kind of things that I may end up writing about in the future. I believe that the topics will still be chosen at random, but I may blog about things that are slightly less geared towards random facts. They'll be more geared towards social issues and other things that people are more likely to be able to apply to their lives instead. In the near future, you might expect to read a blog from me about how one can deal with noisy neighbors or with people they don't wish to be friends with.
But by the time that happens, xanga may be a different place than it is now. Perhaps there will be other "extroverted" blogs that are similar to my xanga site. When I created my xanga site, one of my goals was to make it different than most others and to provide content that was similar to existing extroverted blog sites such as Milk and Cookies. After one and a half years later, I know of two people who have tried to follow my example and admit that they were inspired by the "uniqueness" of my blog. It's very nice to hear these words from such people and I certainly prefer them over those that are left by people who think that my xanga site is "too weird" or "stupid."
When will I no longer have the time to continue writing? Although it can be any day from now, I have a feeling that I'll still be around here longer than most people because I have too many things that I want to write about. Still, there will be a day when I'll stop writing and knowing that there are probably thousands of people on xanga who can write better than I can, I'm thinking about passing on the writing duties to a group of people who have similar writing (and thinking) ability when this does happen. My site can probably be updated on a daily basis if it's being managed by a group of responsible people and I do think that one of the largest drawbacks to the potential of my xanga site is that it isn't updated often enough. As a consequence, it doesn't get anywhere as much exposure as others who appear on Featured Content every day. But at the same time, I understand that finding people who possess similar writing and thinking ability isn't going to be easy. Some of my readers meet this criteria, but I'm not sure if they'll have the time or even want to do it by then.
Most people would probably just stop writing if they didn't have the time to do it anymore, but those who have a site that's visited by many people every day may be left with different options. The decision to leave is a lot easier when your site isn't as popular, but when even the CEO of xanga knows that your site exists and visits it frequently, you kind of feel obligated to continue writing. You almost feel as if it's your duty or something, I guess. With more than 800 readers to my xanga site at the time of this writing, choosing to stop updating and let it go to waste would be a poor option. It'd also go against my past beliefs about certain people who have left their xanga sites and let people down by announcing that they've "retired" and won't update again.
Even though the future of my xanga site doesn't sound so good after reading all of this, the future's still looking good in terms of readership. I get new readers every week, but only a fraction of them leave comments to tell me how I'm doing. All in all, my site can go into much greater lengths if I can find a way to solve a few existing problems that I'm still struggling to manage.
