Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Scott Rosenberg

Archives

Wordyard / Blogging / “Bloggy to the core” indeed

“Bloggy to the core” indeed

by

bring_out_yer_dead

People are talking about blogs. Again! And not just random nameless “people” cited in some clueless trend story. Specific people are talking about reviving their actual blogs. In some cases, they are even following through.

Michael Sippey, who was so early into blogging it wasn’t even called “weblogging” back then, is doing something like what he used to do in his Obvious Filter over on Medium. Elizabeth Spiers, the original Gawker (and author, most recently, of this superb profile), promises to “write mostly badly and more often” on her personal blog. Vox Media’s Lockhart Steele, declaring that “the web ecosystem will always be bloggy at its core,” announced that he is returning to personal blogging. Susannah Breslin, whose work I first encountered in the days of the original Salon Blogs program, is back at her personal blog with some reflections on “autonomy and freedom.” Christian Crumlish, too. These are people in my universe who I know or whose work I know; look around your world and you may spot similar stirrings.

Jason Kottke noticed some of these developments, and, of course, linked. Fred Wilson, the VC blogger par excellence, noticed them, too, and wrote:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

So let’s be clear: Blogging never went away; if anything, we walked away from it. In large groups, for sure — but hardly unanimously. Many extraordinary bloggers never stopped writing.

As someone who spent several years of my life chronicling the brief but colorful history of the blog, and who within the past few months has put some serious time back into my own wee project here, I’m pleased at this ferment, however it rises — or sours.

It’s a trend! And the really fun thing about trends the second time around is that the media machine generally ignores them. The breathless bad stories all got written already a long time ago. There’s nothing novel left to mine.

Are we really going to see the reconstitution of the blogging era of a decade ago? Of course I have some more thoughts about where all this is headed. But I’ll save them for the next post.

Post Revisions:

Comments

  1. Thanks for the shout out. The old Salon blogs experiment gave my original “online journaling” a second wind, a community, and a hint of the follow/re-post dynamic that has made later social-media forms so useful.

    Now, I’m trying to get back on board the indieweb train and host my own content as much as possible, and do a bit more longer-form, reflective writing.

    I’ve missed it!

Trackbacks


  4. We talk about Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Ag and Big Tobacco. Maybe it’s time we started talking about Big Internet.
    That thought crossed my mind after reading a couple of recent blog posts. One was Scott Rosenberg’s piece about a renaissance in the ancient art of blogging. I hadn’t even realized that blogs were a thing again, but Rosenberg delivers the evidence. Kottke, too, says that blogging is once again the geist in our zeit.
    The other piece was Alan Jacobs’s goodbye to Twitter. Jacobs writes of a growing sense of disillusionment and disappointment with the ubiquitous microblogging platform:

    As long as I’ve been on Twitter (I started in March 2007) people have been complaining about Twitter. But recently things have changed. The complaints have increased in frequency and intensity, and now are coming more often from especially thoughtful and constructive users of the platform. There is an air of defeat about these complaints now, an almost palpable giving-up. For many of the really smart people on Twitter, it’s over. Not in the sense that they’ll quit using it altogether; but some of what was best about Twitter — primarily the experience of discovery — is now pretty clearly a thing of the past.

    “Big Twitter was great — for a while,” says Jacobs. “But now it’s over, and it’s time to move on.”
    These trends, if they are actually trends, seem related. I sense that they both stem from a sense of exhaustion with what I will henceforth call Big Internet. By Big Internet, I mean the platform- and plantation-based internet, the one centered around giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter and Apple. Maybe these companies were insurgents at one point, but now they’re fat and bland and obsessed with expanding or defending their empires. They’ve become the Henry VIIIs of the web. And it’s starting to feel a little gross to be in their presence.
    So, yeah, count me in. Bring back personal blogs. Bring back RSS. Screw Big Internet.
    But, please, don’t bring back the term “blogosphere.”
    Promulgate:Email

  6. Last sum­mer, my friend Karl Mar­tino shared this post from Scott Rosen­berg on Face­book some time ago and I got a lit­tle excited. Could blog­ging really be back? I’ve writ­ten about the death of music blogs and Jere­miah declared the golden age of tech blog­ging dead back in 2011. What Rosen­berg hit on in his fol­low up — the migra­tory pat­terns of the “hive mind” — made me think less about plat­forms and more about the sin­gu­lar tool that enabled blogs to really become pop­u­lar: RSS.
    Google Reader rode off into the sun­set back in 2013. Noth­ing really replaced it, despite a race to rebuild it. Before any­one declares blogging’s back, let’s be hon­est with our­selves: RSS made the bloggy core of the web pos­si­ble. Right now, I have a bunch of tabs open and I’m click­ing through to addi­tional posts and form­ing thoughts and responses. This was only pos­si­ble using “read it later” tools.  In the bloggy hey­day, I would sub­scribe to count­less blogs and refresh Google Reader end­lessly to keep up as they col­lected through­out the day. You’d think I was describ­ing Twit­ter or Tum­blr or Face­book, but these leaky net­works are sieves com­pared to the net RSS provided.
    Two reflec­tions:
    the social web cre­ated the sense of FOMO that keeps us refresh­ing feeds cease­lessly so we make sure we don’t miss a thing. It’s impos­si­ble to be a part of the dia­logue if you miss it completely.
    The notion that “if news is impor­tant, it’ll find me” is true only if you hope to cement your solipsism.
    In many respects. the social web has evolved into the online equiv­a­lent of Jacques Lacan and Judith But­ler cor­re­spond­ing in pub­lic via aca­d­e­mic jour­nals. We can all read the arti­cles, but they’re not really talk­ing to “us.” Sure, the social web enables us to par­tic­i­pate, but that par­tic­i­pa­tion too often feels like tweet­ing at celebri­ties, in the hopes of the odd fave or retweet.
    I’m not sure any­thing can be done about that last bit. Part of the prob­lem of say­ing “blog­ging is back” in any mean­ing­ful way ignores how the scope and veloc­ity of infor­ma­tion online with­out new ways to cap­ture a daily digest of what hap­pened. Remem­ber when you’d check Google Reader and it would be loaded with updates from every blog you fol­lowed that reflected the lat­est press release hit­ting the wire? Now the social web is the same echo cham­ber that rever­ber­ates to reach every time zone online. What’s miss­ing from the social web today — and what made blog­ging in the early days so great — was that period where it felt like you “knew” “every­one” online. To bor­row from Bene­dict Ander­son, we can’t recap­ture those “imag­ined com­mu­ni­ties” that cre­ated a sense of inti­macy and shared under­stand­ing on the web.
    The clos­est I’ve seen any­one come to acknowl­edg­ing this gap is ThinkUp, which takes stock of your activ­ity in the social web. But quan­ti­fy­ing activ­ity isn’t the same as chang­ing behav­ior. Bene­dict Evans tweet­stormed about “dis­cov­ery” and I think it sums things up nicely as it relates to how con­ver­sa­tion has evolved online. I’ll end here.
     

    The para­dox of the Inter­net: you can now find any­thing if you know it exists, but there is too much even to have heard of everything.
    — Bene­dict Evans (@BenedictEvans) Feb­ru­ary 24, 2015

    Share:Click to email this to a friendClick to share on TwitterShare on FacebookMoreClick to share on Google+Click to share on LinkedInClick to share on PinterestClick to share on RedditClick to share on Tumblr

    Related