It is exactly 1 year ago when I published my last article on this blog which is of course no coincidence. After 1 year of silence from the readers I can safely state that nobody bothers anymore about the future of this blog. Sounds absolutely normal right ? Unless you look at the statistics of this blog which indicate this blog received during its existence almost 300.000 visits and every day still does attract a couple of dozen more despite no new content has been published for a year.
In 2013 I started this blog at the request of some readers of my Dutch twin-blog as they were struggling with google-translate. They really liked to read my articles but the translation from Dutch to English was extremely poor by google-translate which made it very hard to understand the content. However translating each article manually is no small task especially for somebody not being an expert in English. So when I started with this free service, I really hoped to get some comments on the articles which I could also learn from or just enjoy.
Unfortunately this last part never materialized. On more than 250 published articles on this blog only 40 comments by readers were made. Of course nobody is forced to comment but only 40 while almost 300.000 visits just gives me the feeling most readers are pure consumers. Taking but never giving. Yes sure again it is all voluntary but that is exactly also why this ends.
Well that last part is not entirely correct. The Dutch twin-blog is still going strong. In the last year 43 new articles were published on it. There I do get regularly comments. However I also maintain that blog in first instance for myself as some archive/ diary/ collection of stories.... Besides google-translate made some serious progress since 2013 when I started this blog. The translations are of a much higher quality and there exists now the possibility to add a button to a blog which allows to produce automated translations of the articles in "only" 109 different languages.
So one can argue that instead of this English blog which isn't maintained anymore that we get 109 ones in return. This may be the end here but it is not a definite end of the blogging about chess for me. I know a lot of readers already made the switch (which I notice in the increase of foreign visitors) so you are definitely welcome at schaken-brabo.blogspot.com. Besides if ever one of you wants to surprise me by writing a comment then don't be shy about doing it not in Dutch. I can read/ understand several languages and there is still google translate for me if something is not clear.
Brabo
