If you participated in my reader survey (which is now closed) let me first thank you for taking the time! I’m incredibly happy so many people participated. For those who didn’t have the time, the survey essentially was all about content. I started this website ten years ago, and I was curious about both what readers thought about existing content (specifically what they are interested in) and about possible future content (ditto). I’ve always believed that this website’s focus should be on providing content. Content (as opposed to mere PR, say) is what I am personally interested in, and the results of the survey indicate that there is indeed a larger interest in that. A first, direct consequence of the survey has already made an appearance: My first meditation on a photograph is a result of large numbers of people noting that they would like to see articles like that. There will definitely be more of those types of articles. There will also be more interviews. (more)

Of course, you might wonder why I was asking these questions. Why not simply write what comes to my mind without wondering whether people are interested? The answer is simple: Right now, it’s a question of time. With the exception of the guest contributions by Christopher Thomas, this website is a one-person operation, and producing content takes time. So knowing which type of content is of interest helps me produce content. I’m not going to write about things I’m not interested in. But when in doubt what to focus on knowing that something might be of less interest than something else helps.

I don’t want to spend this anniversary year navel-gazing. There is a lot of talk about blogs (“are blogs dead?”) or about photography criticism (“is photo criticism dead?”) or about whether or not the internet is making us all stupid. These debates might or might not have merit. But instead of worrying about any of those questions I made the decision to ignore them, to simply produce content on photography.

After working on Conscientious for ten years, I now have a bit of a vested interest in it: I want to make sure the site is as good and as interesting as I can make it. The blog was started at a time when I had a lot of trouble finding information about photographers online. It was frustrating. So I decided to compile such information, in the hope that other people would find it useful. With time I then added other types of content that, I thought, were good to have. The reader survey has provided invaluable input in terms of where to go, what to do. Again: Thank you for your input!

PS: Many more people than expected left their contact information in the survey. I started looking at the responses, but I have not contacted anyone, yet.