Why I don't Write Much Online Anymore

I haven't posted much here or on any other of my websites for quite a while, and I wanted to explain why. Back in 2002 when I began writing online, there was a dearth of information and the Internet was still fairly new. Over the next 7 years I produced hundreds of articles on different subjects and designed and maintained several different websites.

As a dearth of information turned into a glut, I gradually lost my interest in writing online. I saw the average amount of time spent on my most commercial website drop from 3 minutes per visitor years back to a half a minute or less. People no longer bookmark websites or read through them like they once did. It matters less and less where information is posted; search engine algorithms allow people to find what they are looking for faster than ever.

Furthermore, mega-sites like Wikipedia or Lonely Planet (many fields have a mega-site, or several, that dominate a subject matter) continue to gain influence while niche sites like my own have to look for ever smaller niches to develop a market in.

Another issue is the global trend of spending more and more time online and on computers or smart phones. I don't know about you, but I don't wish to spend any more time in front of a computer screen than I currently do. My healthy maximum is roughly five hours a day. Of this approximately two hours is online. Many people are spending a lot more than this. While I was developing my larger websites, I routinely spent far more than this.

If I have five hours day to spend on computers, that means I have to ration my time. There is always pressure to spend much more than that. I try to spend 2-3 hours writing and force everything else I need to do into the remaining time. The only way for me to get that much writing done is to not have Internet at home, where I do almost all my writing.

Now that everyone has a blog (often more than one) and is posting on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter, I have lost interest in being a part of this online world of quick information "injections" and have switched my effort to writing books and to building offline communities with a very modest online presence. I believe I'm at the head of a new trend, so watch for more people like me.

At least where I live, there is increasing demand for meaningful, structured, face-to-face interaction. That's what I specialize in. I'm the organizer of a popular language club here in Tbilisi where people meet on different nights of the week to converse in different foreign languages. I take people backpacking into the mountains. And I'm doing more and more music-related activities.

I'm also in the process of writing two books that — I hope — will seduce people into sitting down and reading carefully for hours on end.