12/05/2017

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

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.

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# Liked: Colin Devroe

# Started working on a way to list potentially similar bloggers based on received webmentions (filtering for duplicates) - this is to aid discovery for site visitors looking to find other blogs to try. Very rough and ready but it seems to be working.

6 comments: click to read or leave your own Comments