The last time I posted to this site was October of last year — a full 10 months ago.
Everyone knows that to get an audience on a blog, you need to post consistently. Maybe not daily, maybe not even weekly — but you need to be engaged in the work of building your audience and delivering to them the type of content that’s going to interest them on some regular basis.
Not only have I not done that, but the last post I wrote, “Big Ears 2024, Part 1,” carried an implicit promise of a Part 2 — which, of course, never arrived. Not that the world was waiting for it. Like a lot of niche blogs, this one doesn’t have much of audience. Of course, it might stand a chance of getting one … if I actually posted more often.
As a professional communicator — I work in communications at the University of South Carolina — I should know this more than most people. And yet, the Spot on the Hill blog site has been woefully erratic and inconsistent since the day I launched it in January, 2020.
To be honest, I can’t promise that will change. When I can muster the energy to be upstairs in my music room at night, where my computer is, I generally prefer to be playing an instrument or working on something in Logic Pro than writing a blog post. Sometimes I jot down notes of recordings or topics I should post about, but I never quite get around to writing about them.
And yet … I can’t quite bring myself to shut down the site. When I scroll through past posts, I get something out of it. It reminds me of thinking about the roots of minimalism and discovering the music of artists like Clarice Jensen, Shida Shahabi and Ben McElroy, whom I was later able to make a record with.
So, every year when I get a notification from my web-hosting company that I need to pay up for another year, I consider the calculus. On the one hand, I haven’t done much with this site. And on the other hand, I have done some things — and, theoretically, I could do more.
Maybe this is a classic example of the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people are reluctant to give something up when they’ve invested a lot of time, money or effort into it — even though it’s clear that giving it up would be more advantageous.
Or, alternatively, maybe I just haven’t invested enough.