Reviewing blogs one at a time can give a different perspective than one seen by a regular reader. Instead of just stopping in for the latest, I make an effort look at the site in its entirety.  When I review a site, I try to go back to the beginning to see how the blog and the blogger evolve.  Sometimes this is just a matter of a few months.  Other times, it means years, and in those cases, hundreds of posts and thousands of comments.

 

The more blogs I look at, especially in the erotic genre, the more I wonder if blogs shouldn’t have a built in expiration date.  I’ve noticed that there seem to be stages in a blog’s evolution.  The beginning is often timid, even inhibited until the blogger becomes more comfortable with issues like expression, message and audience.  Sometimes, new bloggers have a lot on their mind and come out blasting.  While usually better initially, the reason quickly fades and one can feel both the author and the audience losing interest.

 

Most blogs seem to hit a stride after a few months.  By this time, the blogger develops a rapport, and often a dialog, with her audience and is getting enough out of it to keep up with regular posting.  After that though, it becomes more difficult to sustain momentum.  In the sex blog context, the subject matter is necessarily narrow and does not always lend itself to constant evolution.  The better bloggers seem to be aware of this reality and have developed various means to manage it, whether by selective embellishment of their adventures, actually trying new things, modifying their literary technique, or by slowly shifting focus.

 

The best examples of this evolution are the “lifestyle” sex bloggers.  When they start, almost all they talk about is the sex, sex, sex.  Sure, they pepper tidbits about their lives into the mix, providing context (or perhaps false realism) to their salacious tales.  If they hang around for awhile though, we start seeing more life and less sex life in the posts. 

 

When I started reviewing, I went to several of the more venerable blogs, all of which had been recommended by readers as “classics.”  The blogs were good, but they really weren’t about sex very much anymore.  I had to go back months in some cases to get to the stuff that made the blogs famous in the first place.

 

None of this is a criticism.  It is just an observation.  In some cases, the evolution itself is interesting, and what it means really depends on the original nature of the blog.  One generalization that does strike me, though, is that the long-term evolution far more often moves from more sex to less sex than it does the other way around.  I guess even sex bloggers get tired of it after awhile, and just want to talk about something else.