One of Korea’s most high-profile expat blogs has shut off its server space after 12 years online.
Robert Koehler’s Marmot’s Hole blog was a mainstay of the expat blogosphere, but was closed Monday, as the author said he was no longer willing to commit the time and money needed to maintain it.
“I’ve been doing it since 2003 and, you know, I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. And frankly it was more aggravation than it was anything else,” he said.
“To be honest, blogging is, I think to some extent it’s seen its heyday. Most of the discourse these days is going on on social media. That’s where things are moving, and if I’m spending $150 a month on keeping my website up, it’s like ‘why?’”
He said visitors to the blog had been decreasing, although he put that largely down to a reduction in the amount of time he and his cobloggers were putting into posting.
“The other thing, too, is that it’s like Andrew Sullivan: You just run out of things to say.”
Koehler credits the popularity of the blog in part to filling a niche at a time when blogging was starting to become popular and there was little information on Korea available in English.
“I think most people were coming in because it was fairly well written and there were translations on it, so if you didn’t read Korean it was a good way of getting a different point of view or read about things that weren’t necessarily published elsewhere,” he said.
He said that the aggravation he referred to hadn’t bothered him much at the start, when he was “young and full of fire,” but he added that blogging was a learning experience, and he now viewed situations differently.
“When I started I thought I knew everything, and by the end I realized, ‘Gee, I really don’t know much,’” he said.
That had an effect on how he approached subjects, and ultimately made doing so more time consuming.
“The tone of it changed. I started the blog very stridently right-wing, and you learn over time that problems that you thought were simple, or black and white, really aren’t,” he said.
“To blog that fairly and in a way that does those issues justice requires a lot of time and a lot of research, and a lot of explaining to people are maybe not familiar with the background to a problem.”
“I would rather be up a mountain taking night shots of the city.”
Later on, the blog was contributed to by cobloggers, who posted from a different perspective, perhaps most notably The Korean, who is also known for his Ask A Korean blog. These were sometimes quite different in politics to Koehler, but he said that an important part of blogging was to be open to different perspectives.
“My politics tend to run right of center, but interacting with guys who are a little bit more progressive than I am, it shows you that they have a side too,” he said.
“You always have to respect the other side, and that’s something I didn’t do necessarily when I first started the blog. That’s something I think I got better at over time.
“Whether I improved sufficiently, I don‘t know. I certainly tried. When I started out, I may have come across as anti-Korean. I think by the time I ended, a lot of people thought I was a Korea apologist, which maybe is true. In a way, I hope it is true.”
The blog’s posts and comments have been removed, leaving only a good-bye message. Some readers have asked him to put the old posts up, but though he said he would consider it, he has no plans to do so.
Koehler will continue his photo blog, something more aligned with his day job as editor of Seoul Magazine.
Its a subject that he hopes will lead to less aggravation
“Nobody ever flame-warred a photograph,” he said.
Koehler’s photo blog is at rjkoehler.tumblr.com.
By Paul Kerry (
paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)
