The state of blogging, update: recovery and discovery
In September last year I wrote that a lot of the blogs I historically followed had shut down or just stopped being updated. People didn't appear to be writing any more - at least not on their own sites.
We are constantly told there are millions of blogs out there but our experiences often imply that the numbers and reality don't always tally.
But, more recently, I think the problem is not that people aren't blogging, but finding those that are.
Recovery
Blogging seemed to die back for a while but, as I wrote more recently, getting involved with the Micro.blog and, now, #indieweb communities has meant finding people who are, again, enthusiastic about their own sites.
As a result I have been gradually re-populating my RSS reader with good, old-fashioned personal blogs.
But I still want more!
One of my hopes for Micro.blog was that it might encourage more people to write in long form once they got used to self-hosting their microposts.
Since the launch to Kickstarter backers I have, indeed, seen a number state it has prompted them to return to their sites with more vigor and become re-engaged with what they are, or could be, doing.
This is fantastic, but more needs to be done. A lot more.
Discovery
The biggest issue, as with so many other areas online, is of discovery. I'm not so sure that the blog rolls, directories and blogging networks of yesteryear, however, are the right solutions to the problem.
We need to get better at both sharing and advertising blogs, those of others and our own. We need to reclaim the conversation from social media by using our own sites to reply and comment - this is where elements of the indieweb come into their own.
But, most importantly we need to keep reading and writing, engaging with each other via our blogs to, at least, enable organic discovery.
Comments
# Liked: Colin Devroe
@colinwalker I've also been thinking a lot about the discoverability issue you note at the end of your post. What do you think of reviving web rings? Could webmentions be used to automatically create networks of connected sites?
@colinwalker Interesting piece. Recently relaunched my blog too. I agree that we need to enhance discoverability.
@eli @colinwalker Discovery is certainly a difficult issue. Perhaps we could talk Kevin and Tantek into reconstituting Technorati?! :) Interestingly this is the third time I've heard about webrings in the last month, and only after serendipitously coming across the only one I'd seen in over a decade or more: https://hotlinewebring.club/ Kevin Marks started a table of "Lost Infrastructure" not too long ago: http://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure
https://colinwalker.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Sonant-Thoughts-Episode-21-Ten-Years.m4a
Ten years is an eternity in internet time – we’ve come so far but, in some ways, taken backward steps so it’s easy to get nostalgic. We can each do our bit to reclaim the spirit of the old web. Links: Des’ comment The state of blogging The social web, not social networks
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<a href="https://colinwalker.blog/2017/05/24/sonant-thoughts-episode-21-ten-years/">→ May 24th, 2017</a>A while back I wrote a post called The Micro Blogging Evolution Begins, in which I discussed being a Kickstarter backer for the Micro.Blog initiative by Manton Reece — @manton. Since then I, and other Kickstarter backers, have experimented with this new platform and its iOS app (developed by @manton). Some of the initial users are lurking, some haven’t really done anything with it (yet), and the rest of us are trying to see how it fits into our writing. At its core, micro.blog is a way of making short blog posts, either on your own, existing, blog, or on a hosted micro.blog. As a Kickstarter backer, I have both — this blog at DesParoz.com and desparoz.micro.blog — and have been playing around with both approaches. The key to micro.blog is that regardless of where you host your content, it is on your own platform, but then there are powerful social interaction tools. The stream is comprised not of tweets inside a “walled garden”, but instead of micro posts from all over the web that are loosely coupled to gain interaction. Noah Read described micro.blog well in an excellent blog post:
You should take a read of Noah’s post to get a better understanding of micro.blog. Blogging pioneer Dave Winer emphasised the importance of owning your own content, and not being constrained to fit the format of platforms in a post on wanting his old blog back:
I think Dave nailed it nicely with this post[1]. Over the years since blogging took off platforms like Twitter, Medium, Facebook and others have sprung up and provided various “solutions” to people sharing ideas, thoughts and content online. In the process they created (at least) three problems:
The content has to be shaped to a fit a platforms requirements (e.g. 140 characters); and/or, The content has to be shaped to fit algorithms (SEO); and/or, The content ends up in a “walled garden”, in which it is virtually (or actually) owned by the platform.
micro.blogging forms a part of the Indie Web approach where content owners should own their own content, where they focus on writing, designing or otherwise sharing content for humans first (perhaps primarily, or even just, for themselves), and not to serve an algorithm. Another key aspect of the Indie Web is the concept of POSSE wherein a writer publishers first on their own platform, and then syndicates to other platforms. This post for example will be published first on DesParoz.com, and will syndicate to my micro.blog and Twitter feeds as well as to a mirror site on Tumblr and perhaps to Medium. micro.blog and IndieWeb tools are important parts of this process. The ‘glue’ that helps to bubble the underlying content up into the social web. The potential of micro.blogging is best expressed by blogger and micro.blogger Colin Walker in an excellent post on the State of Blogging:
So where does it all stand for me? My main site here at DesParoz.com will continue to be the home for my content, including micro posts. My hosted (paid) micro.blog site will be a link blog, and the overall micro.blog feed will marry up all my content, providing the underlying social glue.
As I am about to publish this site, I’ve just noted that Dave has also published about why he won’t point to Facebook posts ↩
Also published on Medium.
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The state of blogging, update: recovery and discovery by Colin Walker (Social Thoughts) Micro.blog takes me back to my blogging beginnings, excited by a small community of Scots Edu Bloggers, loosely connected outward, it was easy to pull stuff together. Webrings popped up in the tilde club scene recently, but I think your principal of reclaiming the conversation has a better chance. Reply to: The state of blogging, update: recovery and discovery Like this: Like Loading...