Jurga

Tonight I end a 21-year blogging career. I wrote my very first blog post on 3 March 2003 on an old, long-dead blog in what seemed like another lifetime ago. In fact, it was. Blogging connected me to the world at a time my life was isolated and controlled in an increasingly abusive marriage. It gave me a way to learn and to share my knowledge with others, and when my husband died from brain cancer it gave me a way to support my family, to contribute to my oldest’s wedding, and to put my youngest through college. That was possible not just because I could reach readers through Google, but because I could turn my thoughts and knowledge into an ad-supported commodity that attracted others who wanted to know what I knew. That has been taken from me now. Google has claimed my work as theirs. They make it freely available without attribution. I can no longer turn my knowledge into an income — but Google has. And I had no say in it. I was not asked if I was fine with my personal insights or experience being paraphrased and turned into machine-regurgitated answers (which are often wrong because they fail to grasp the nuances involved). “It’s just info.” That’s what people who don’t actually create anything keep saying. They’re wrong. It was so much more than “just info.” It was knowledge acquired through personal experience. It was time spent writing that knowledge in a way that was accessible and understandable. It was all the weeks and months that went into building and maintaining a site to hold that knowledge in wait for someone who might need it. It was years spent learning to optimize that site, years spent learning and relearning with every algorithm change, every new technology, every new online fad. It was my creation. It was my accomplishment. It was my life. It was the food in my family’s mouths, the clothes on our backs, the medicine I need just to walk. It was mine and Google stole it. I am not feeding that evil beast again.