Culinary Blog LJ

Coming up with a title for this post, I had to choose between “quo vadis?” and “why are you coming?”. Both mean “where are you going?” and this is the question I constantly turn into space when I read other people's culinary blogs.

When I first started my food blog, almost all the really interesting food blogs were on LiveJournal. Now, eight years later, the situation has not improved, and there are practically no sensible culinary blogs on my own domain: of those that I regularly read, offhand I can only name Olga Baklanova's All Salt, and perhaps a couple more.

Food blogger at work - photo from www.wsj.com

Before you can argue with me, I want to clarify that a blog is not just a website. For me, a culinary blog must have:

The personality of the author. If by the first three lines and the photo of the recipe I immediately understand whose blog I have landed on, then the goal has been achieved.
Not only recipes. We are all living people, and even bloggers have other hobbies. If a person writes a blog simply because he cannot help but write, then from time to time he will write not only recipes, but also posts on other topics.
Communication. What is a blog without communication? Comments are the most valuable thing in my blog, and I think that many will agree with this. It is easy to fill the site with content, create an active community around it - the task is much less trivial.

If the site does not have at least one of the listed things, then it is anything but a blog. Alas, 95% of the food blogs I've come across fail this filter.

What about LiveJournal? And it's even worse there. LiveJournal is no longer the same, and there are fewer and fewer people who actively write for their journals. Communities are dying out, many are moving to Facebook, a platform that is designed for anything but creating and organizing content that lives longer than a couple of hours, at best, a couple of days. Another trend is that many bloggers, realizing that it is impossible for us to make money on a blog (just for, not under), strive to go offline. Everything would be fine, but after a couple of successful workshops or a published book, the amount of interesting content that is shared in the public domain is rapidly falling, and this is already a big problem for our entire blogosphere.