# Om Malik linked to a post by TTTThis called "If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs".
From my perspective what the post actually highlights is not issues with blogs themselves but with discovery and platforms.
There are absolutely blogs out there, lots of them, doing their own thing, not terribly visible, not being SEO'd and hunting for traffic, just labours of love, someone spending time with their thoughts and publishing them on the web. It's true, it's hard to find a lot of them - even if you know where to look - because people don't always advertise them in any meaningful way, don't link to them, maybe don't even talk about them on their social channels (if they use social channels at all).
They just write and that's it, that's enough for them, that's all they need, they don't even really care if anyone sees it.
But some people like to read, like to immerse themselves in these visions from other worlds, other lives, other minds.
Following on from Chris' comments yesterday, the author describe blogs as:
"...something you can sit down and read and get really into to the point you forget where you even are, and think about how you want to try those things maybe in your life, or just enjoy their writing, and you can read deeper into them into past blog posts, and tune back in later and see what they've posted since the last things you read about them."
Instead of big names or corporate blogs SEO'd to within an inch of their lives "what you really want is 10,000 unsuccessful blogs", the lives and thoughts of real, normal people writing about what they love and enjoy.
Still, there is often a disconnect between the blog and the reader but is it something that always needs to be fixed?
Probably not.
How do you fix it even if the answer is yes?
It seems that you can, at least in part, rely on interaction. The comments of the above post include a reference to #100DaysToOffload - an idea by Kev Quirk to "challenge people to publish 100 posts on their personal blog in a year."
"Posts don’t need to be long-form, deep, meaningful, or even that well written. If there are spelling and grammar mistakes, or even if there’s no real point to the post, so what? What’s important is that you’re writing about the things you want to write about."
There's even a blogroll, RSS feed, and a river of posts to make it easy for us.
@colinwalker I saw this too, and noticed there was no mention of micro.blog which I think has the potential to be this sort of discovery/hosting solution.
@canion I don't think it would fix a number of his asks from a platform but there's a lot it does do that could help.
I’m hesitant to link to this TTTThis post due to their position on hate speech which unlike them I will not put in scare-quotes (link, again, via Colin Walker), but for better or worse they said this really interesting thing about blogging.
Emphasis mine, because hello: it me.
This Status was mentioned on cdevroe.com
@colinwalker I have had some personal blogs in my RSS reader for what seems like almost two decades, and I have blogged for over 15 years. The blog had more traffic in the eearly day but the level of engagement and traffic went down around 2011-2012 as readers moved their interests to Twitter and Facebook. When I started using Webmentions and Semantic Linkbacks a few years ago, I was able to pull back in some of that engagement from Facebook. When Facebook removed API support for the personal timeline, the participation dropped off again.
I think discovery is the main issue.
@khurtwilliams Absolutely, discovery is definitely key. There's no doubt that the way we read and converse online have changed forever and there's no way back from that but there's got to be ways we can make blogs more discoverable again without trying to roll back the clock.
Micro.blog takes a different approach by combining blogs with the well-trodden timeline but it still requires a lot of manual labour to find things.