End of the world internet: The Survivalist Blog

The Survivalist Blog has put out an offer to trade links at the small cost of a review of his blog.  As he is one of the more popular blogs for the true preparer-survivalists it is a pretty generous offer.

Well the first question you would ask if is:  Why is it so popular? 

·         He posts on a regular basis.

·         It is a very inclusive website.  Comments are encouraged and the author makes frequent appearance within the comments himself. Comments are posted quickly.

·         Many of the postings such as “What was your most embarrassing-awkward moment”, or “what did you do to prepare this week” are designed to set up a sense of community

·         The author is very personal and forthright about his personal experiences, and occasional problems. 

·         Unlike some, the author is reasonably modest and relaxed. 

·         He meshes the commercial aspects of his site well with the content.  The product and book reviews are frequent and good source for ideas.  The advertisements and commercial content are not a huge distraction.  They are relevant to his site content.

·         He is accepting of a broad variety of secular end-of-days scenarios.

·         He does not constantly rant about his personal political peeves.

·         Did I mention, he posts on a regular basis?

Of course good points often have their flip-side.

His acceptance of so many possible scenarios, that it does occasionally make it a little difficult to prioritize the relative value of the preparation measures.  Should you really give an EMP scenario the same weighting as Peak Oil issues or general nuclear war?

He is of the relatively standard libertarian-survivalist mindset, as opposed to the cooperative community brand of survivalism.   Both approaches have their blind spots and seem to be almost completely ignorant of the other.  Some of this is likely because of the accidental political history that caused the enviro-friendly meme to be adopted by the same political groups that have been historically opposed to Second Amendment gun rights.  There is no real interconnection between the ideas,  but in American politics that is the way it is.

His current personal experience is as an all-in, isolated rural living.  As such, it tends toward the guns and camping mindset. I like guns and camping content, so that is fine with me.  However, rural U.S.A. is quickly becoming the rural low density version of the inner city.  The negative impact of locating yourself in an area with low potentials for employment or cash flow is not always addressed well.

He puts more thought and research into his posts then most.  He will link to definitions and products but he does not always link or reference his sources in a thorough fashion.  Since even my never ending multi-part posts, are relatively short, this limits the amount of further research that can be done by the reader.

He is relatively young and single.  I have not seen a lot of thought given to what older people; particularly older people with limited means might do to improve their situation.  If he has had a posting on survival diapers, I missed it. LOL.

What would I change?

There is a fare amount of guest-posting.  Some of these posts are very weak. 

This guest posting appears to be fairly common with the commercially focused preparer sites.  I suspect that the very broad range of audience, with the narrow focus of the postings makes it difficult to keep from posting the same post over and over again.  It can take a lot of research to come up with completely new posting ideas, and it is particularly hard to condense new ideas into posts that will fit within the size of a standard blog posting (thus my many multi-part postings here). 

My suggestion would be to haunt the camping-fishing-outdoor blogs and news sources and pick up their relevant links.   Looking here, she was posting snow prints of different animals; that would certainly relate to both tracking and hunting scenarios. I am amazed at how many infrequent posters do mass link-posts when half of those links would make a fine post ideas.

As a final suggestion, allowing readers their input, make a list of collapse-catastrophe scenarios and their likelihood of occurrence.  And then post it somewhere for all to see. This does not mean that you have to ignore scenarios off or low on the list, but would give a little more common focus as to what the first priority for preparation will be.  It also allows another occasional audience reaction post (Does our list need updating?) along with introduction of new factors to be added onto a particular scenario.  By breaking out disasters responses by type, the subject would be less amorphous, more easily addressed, and more easily broken down into multiple posts.  As an example, a post about resources of medical care facility in a pandemic might have very different than those after an economic collapse.

Well this post is getting long, but The Survivalist Blog has a lot of material to cover.  I doubt I have even scratched the surface.