Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Scott Rosenberg

  • About
  • Greatest hits
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

Archives

Wordyard / Blogging / “Bloggy to the core” indeed

“Bloggy to the core” indeed

September 2, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

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:

  • June 12, 2015 @ 06:50:22 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
  • September 3, 2014 @ 14:46:28 by Scott Rosenberg

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • Print

Filed Under: Blogging, Features, Project

REPORT AN ERROR

Get Scott’s weekly Wordyard email

Notes from me and the week's collection of links and quotes. No spam, and if I ever sell this list or send you a "sponsored email" you'll know that I'm gone and some alien has adopted my identity.

Comments

  1. xian

    September 8, 2014 at 6:01 pm

    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

  1. Tim Rowe says:
    September 3, 2014 at 4:58 am

    Tim Rowe liked this Article on twitter.com

  2. Jeff Severns Guntzel says:
    September 3, 2014 at 4:59 am

    Jeff Severns Guntzel liked this Article on twitter.com

  3. The hive mind migrates — Wordyard says:
    September 3, 2014 at 8:03 pm

    […] with all this noise — all right, murmur — about a blog revival, I say, let’s talk about social networks. Because the whole discussion about blogs and social […]

  4. Big Internet | ROUGH TYPE says:
    September 4, 2014 at 2:45 pm

    Big Internet | ROUGH TYPE mentioned this Article on roughtype.com

  5. Posted by BC at 23:23 says:
    September 8, 2014 at 4:58 am

    Posted by BC at 23:23 mentioned this Article on ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca

  6. Fixing a Hole in the Social Web | Ramsayings says:
    February 26, 2015 at 6:54 pm

    Fixing a Hole in the Social Web | Ramsayings mentioned this Article on jtramsay.com

Creative Commons License Wordyard by Scott Rosenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.