Bringing Blogs Back - Really?
17 May, 2020
Sometimes you read something that makes you shake your head. In my case, it was reading this post.
Go ahead, give the post a once over. I’ll be here waiting for you.
Done? Great. Let’s continue.
The thrust of that post is simple: personal blogs have disappeared off the web, and they really need to make a comeback. OK ...
The personal blogosphere isn’t dead. It’s not dying. There are … well, I don’t know how many personal blogs out there. Some of them are linkstations. Some of them are personal notebooks and journals. Others are outlets for long form writing. Those blogs are as a diverse as the people who publish them.
It’s not as if time and the evolution of blogging haven’t changed things. You can argue, and quite rightly, that personal blogging got overshadowed by so-called professional blogging. You can argue, as I have, that blogging became something of an arms race and drove away some people who posted for fun. Some, but not all.
What I find hilariously uniformed about that post is the assertion that no one is blogging because there’s no platform for them. Uh … no. There are plenty of platforms. Write.as, Blogger (which Google hasn’t killed, regardless of what the writer of that post says), Blot, WordPress.com (which hosts I don’t know how many personal blogs), Ghost (ditto), Postachio. I’m sure you can name a bunch, too.
You might find it hard to discover personal blogs by doing a search, as the author of the post I pointed to a few paragraphs back did. It’s not impossible. Just typing blog into your favourite search engine isn’t going to get the job done.
I agree, though, that discovering blogs is a bit more difficult than it used to be. While Write.as makes it easy, many other platforms don’t. That’s not a failure of blogging, or proof that personal blogs don’t exist or are dying. That points to a weakness those blogging platforms can, and should, address. It also points to the need to revive blogrolls and blogchains.
Personal blogging doesn’t need to be brought back. It never left the web. While it might take you a bit more time to find those blogs, they’re out there. It can be worth the time to track them down.