So this happened:
…
…
I’m off to be a Master!
New horizons await.
Completely new horizons.
It’s both exciting and daunting.
—
Therefore I’ve decided it’s perfect timing to take a break from the blog.
I’ve loved writing, for over 7 years now. I’ve loved the people I’ve met through this blog who I wouldn’t have met otherwise (you know who you are). I’m so glad for the experiences it’s brought into my life.
I’m not sure if I’ll be back. But you’ll know it if/when I am.
Happy making.
—
There have been many grumblings about the changes to Instagram lately. I would probably pay more attention if I used it more than I do – I use it with enthusiasm to see other people’s things, but not so much to publish my own. I’m a content consumer, less a content maker.
I’ve recently been having some thoughts on how Instagram is being used by makers and galleries …
I like to follow my favourite makers and galleries and pages via both Facebook and Instagram. I think that showing support – genuine support of course, not the if-I-like-you-I-expect-you-to-like-me kind of faux-support – is an important part of acknowledging the amazingness of others and for building a community of like-minded people.
However I do get a bit jaded when I see the same image repeated on both platforms.
My own personal rule is to (try to) only publish unique images to Instagram – images that are not repeated on my blog (linked to my Facebook page), though more often than not they’re related to a story on the blog.
Have Instagram users found that they have a remarkably different interaction with their images on Facebook compared to Instagram? Perhaps that’s why the repetition/replication is worthwhile – perhaps the audience is quite different, and those of us who are duplicated (ie. interacting with both platforms) are in the minority.
No doubt marketing experts will tell me that repetition is more valuable than unique images – that the fact that I notice the duplication is the whole point, for recognising the image is proving that I’m paying more attention to that maker / gallery / image.
I’m such a light-weight user of Instagram for the purposes of this blog that the changes in that respect may not impact me. However as an avid reader of other people’s feed, the changes probably will annoy me.
Do you know what other platforms are being moved to in reaction?
It’s been a relatively quiet year, blog-wise.
You’ve no doubt noticed, I’m posting less and less … it’s likely to do with not making as much any more (I still consider I’m ‘taking a break’; I haven’t given up), and something to do with not being able to see as many shows as I’d like to.
To be fair though, I did keep the solid posting-love for about four years there. The below is the number of posts written per month:
everyone loves a graph
The traffic has changed over time too … which is no doubt impacted by my posting frequency, though also by the general decline in blog reading/writing. I cannot get my statistics page to do what I want it to (ie. by month), but visits by year looks like this:
I like the other graph better
The numbers are by no means large … I like to call my little blog ‘hyper-niche’.
My stats page also tells me the top individual posts for 2015 were:
All but the third post above were old ones, probably getting more traffic due to them being popular in previous years (SEO and all). No other post written in 2015 made the top 10; the next popular 2015 post (11th on the list) was Patrícia Correia Domingues & Sara Gackowska ‘Surfacing’ @ Gallery Funaki.
That’s worth a photograph!
photograph taken with gallery permission
Thank you dear reader.
Melbourne Jeweller 