Today marks the 14th anniversary of my first post on ReadWriteWeb, on 20 April 2003. Every year I do a post about it, but this year I’m adding my thoughts about the meaning of blogging in 2017. Do blogs even matter now? I think they do, but in an Internet landscape dominated by Walled Gardens (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and so on), it’s undeniable that blogging on the Open Web has suffered.
Do you remember what made blogging so exciting ten or fifteen years ago? For me it was the comments, trackbacks (a reciprocal link to another blog), links inside the post, blogrolls (a list of blogs you liked), subscribing via RSS, visiting your RSS Reader and favourite blogs every day, your post archive, and tags. All these things built a community: a group of people who visited your blog in order to read about a topic they loved. Then, if a reader was so inspired, they would leave a comment or write their own blog post in response to yours. It really was a beautiful thing, blogging and being part of a topic-focused community.
The other aspect of blogging that was unique at the time was that a blog was usually the result of one person’s passion. A blog was the online persona of an individual, yet it wasn’t ego-driven (or at least the best blogs weren’t). The blogs I used to love reading were driven by passion, for a particular topic or type of thinking. Some of those blogs evolved into group blogs; “professional blogs” was the term for it. But they were still blogs, because they stood for something specific and the writers had a shared passion. I’ll of course use ReadWriteWeb as an example.
I started ReadWriteWeb in 2003 because I was excited about what was happening with Web technology, and in particular that the Web was evolving into a two-way, “read/write” medium. RWW began transitioning into a group blog from the second half of 2006 and into 2007 (for example, Alex Iskold became a regular from September 2006). Things got really serious when I started hiring full-time bloggers in 2007; Josh Catone and Marshall Kirkpatrick were the first two. The common theme during this period was that each new writer who joined the team shared my passion for Web technology. They also shared my values: for forward-thinking analysis, quality over quantity, focusing on products and trends (rather than personalities), thoughtful opinions and not rants, and a kind of idealism about what the Internet was capable of becoming. That shared understanding of what RWW meant – what it stood for – turned RWW from a one-person blog into a topic-focused media brand.
This is a key point about blogging: even though by late 2006 it was no longer just me, RWW was still a blog. It continued to use the blog template – comments, trackbacks and so on. But more importantly, the site also retained the DNA of my original blog persona. I mention all this because sometimes I hear people say, oh a blog is just one person’s opinions. No it’s not: RWW and other pro blogs of that era (Techcrunch, Gigaom, Mashable – to name just a few) all proved that blogs could be much more than that, without losing their essential ‘bloginess.’
Let’s jump forward to today, the era of Facebook and Twitter. I believe we’ve lost those core values of blogging which I just described. Today’s social media is not a place for passion or analysis. It’s been replaced by ego and ephemera. Okay, that’s partly because the read/write, two-way Web vision (of Tim Berners-Lee, Dave Winer, and other giants whose shoulders I stood on) actually came true. When I started blogging in 2002, you could count in the hundreds the number of people who ‘wrote’ on the Web via blogs. It was a small community, those early bloggers. But now, fifteen years later, billions of people share their thoughts on the Web via Facebook, Twitter and similar tools. By any measure, the Read/Write Web (the trend, not the blog) was an astounding success. Except…it maxed out our attention spans. Now, nobody reads or listens – we just write or talk into the ether, each of us stroking our own ego.
There’s another aspect of blogs I really miss: archives. A blog was regularly updated, but its foundation was the archive. In the early days we used to store posts in monthly archives, category archives, and (once “tagging” became a thing) into hashtagged archives. All of this was made easy by the tools: Blogger.com, Radio Userland, Movable Type, WordPress, and others. Indeed one of the pleasures of discovering a new voice in the blogosphere was trawling through their archives, looking for posts about a particular topic you were into at that moment. Seeing what that person, or group of people, thought about that topic.
Sadly, content on Facebook and Twitter doesn’t tend to stick around – at least not in any meaningful way. Sure you can search for something in social media, but unless a hundred other people are also searching for (and have unearthed) that same piece of old content at the exact time you have, it has no “social currency.” It’s worthless, in terms of its Facebooking or Tweeting value. Social media is inherently ephemeral, which is a shame. Because the foundation of a great blog is its archive, and it was usually well organized (via both time and categories).
There are still bloggers out there in 2017, of course. The guy who most influenced me at the start, Dave Winer, continues to post regularly on his blog, Scripting News. In my RSS Reader (yes I still use one!), Feedly, I have a group called ‘Bloggers’ that includes old-school bloggers like Kottke, Waxy.org, danah boyd’s apophenia, and Joho the Blog. Sadly, many of these OG bloggers post less often than they used to (except for Kottke). The reality is, many of the bloggers of my era have now moved their online thoughts to Facebook, Twitter, or the blog-like but bland Medium.com. I wanted to like Medium and gave it a chance by posting there for a while. But even though it was founded by the guy who created Blogger.com, Evan Williams, Medium is oddly homogeneous. Everything looks the same and there’s little room for individual personality. In short, it lacks the charisma of a blog persona and so I just can’t get excited by anything published on Medium.
I’ll finish up by going back to ReadWriteWeb, which is celebrating its 14th birthday today. Although, I have to admit it’s quite far removed from the ReadWriteWeb I knew and grew. The ReadWrite of today (it ditched the ‘Web’ in October 2012, the same time I left the blog) is exclusively about the Internet of Things. A niche topic I blogged a little about around 2009, but it’s not as exhilarating as the trendy topics of today (AI, VR, biotech, etc.). So even I struggle to find much to read on my old blog now, although I appreciate its continuing efforts.
I don’t have any dealings with RWW these days, since it is onto its third owner. The company I sold it to in December 2011, SAY Media, onsold it to a company called Wearable World in 2015. I believe Wearable World has now re-named itself ReadWrite Labs, so the brand name lives on – if little else. Oh and I still get multiple email pitches a day from PR people who obviously haven’t done their homework and think I still work for ReadWrite. I suspect those emails will never end and I’ll be getting them in my retirement village, decades from now.
So, happy birthday to ReadWriteWeb – the memory of it, the current iteration of it, and the idea of blogging that it represented to me (and many others) for a long time.
RWW was truly one of the best technology blogs of its era. You’re right a lot has changed and RSS even when used as social media e.g. Friendfeed was a lot more engaging and created a more focused community.
Cheers Eric. Ah yes, Friendfeed…will always be popular amongst the early bloggers 🙂
Wow! A ride down nostalgia lane. I got my start in tech PR during the dot.com era of the 90s and left in 2001 to work in college athletics and saw the gradual change from an outsider. It was about 2006 that I decided I was done with my sports experiment and jumped back into the world of tech PR in early 2007. What a different world! Bloggers, Web 2.0, Lunch 2.0, the emergence of the “social” web, a genuine passion and community for change, and more. I always found RWW to be one of my favorite ones. Although clients loved TechCrunch, GigaOm or Mashable over RWW, I valued if my story interested you or your team, it received a more thoughtful approach. I used the others to stay on top of big trends, but turned to RWW when I needed depth. Have always appreciated watching you evolve Richard and your insight is spot on. I am hoping history repeats itself as it did with AOL and other walled gardens and we get back to an open format that is less about vanity and more about depth.
Thanks Brian, I’m grateful for your support since the early days. Love that last sentence: “I am hoping history repeats itself as it did with AOL and other walled gardens and we get back to an open format that is less about vanity and more about depth.” I second that!
I remember those days well, although my progress was probably the opposite of yours, and, in my circles, blogging began very selfishly. Lucire began as a publication, laid out the old-school way with HTML, and one of the first sites in the fashion sector to add a blog was a very crappy one where it was about an ill-informed and somewhat amoral editor’s point of view. For years I refused to blog, preferring to continue publishing an online magazine.
Come 2002, and we at the Medinge Group were planning a book called Beyond Branding. One of the thoughts was that we needed one of these newfangled blogs to promote the book, and to add to it for our readers. I was one (the only?) dissenter at the June 2003 meeting, saying that, as far as my contacts were concerned, blogging was for tossers. (Obviously, I didn’t know you back in those days, and didn’t frequent ReadWriteWeb.) By August 2003 it had been set up, and I designed the template for it to match the rest of the book’s artwork. How wrong I was in June. The blog began (and finished, in 2006) with posts in the altruistic, passionate spirit of RWW, and before long (I think it was September 2003), I joined my friends and colleagues.
In 2006, I went off and did my own blog, and even though there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of blogs by now, decent bloggers were still few. I say this because within the first few weeks, a major German newspaper was already quoting my blog, and I got my first al-Jazeera English gig as a result of my blogging a few years later. It was the province of the passionate writer, and the good ones still got noticed.
I still have faith in the blogosphere simply because social media, as you say, have different motives and shared links are fleeting. Want to find a decent post you made on Facebook five years ago? Good luck. Social media might be good for instant gratification—your friends will like stuff you write—but so what? Where are the analysis and the passion? I agree with everything you say here, Richard: the current media aren’t the same, and there’s still a place for long-form blogging. The fact I am commenting (after two others) shows there is. It’s a better place to exchange thoughts, and at least here we’re spared Facebook pushing malware on to people (no, not phishing: Facebook itself).
Eleven years on, and I’m still blogging at my own space. I even manage a collective blogging site for a friend, called Blogcozy. My Tumblr began in 2007 and it’s still going. We should be going away from the big sites, because there’s one more danger that I should point out.
Google, Facebook et al are the establishment now, and, as such, they prop up others in the establishment. Google News was once meritorious, now it favours big media names ahead of independents. This dangerously drowns out those independent voices, and credible writers and viewpoints can get lost. The only exception I can think of is The Intercept, which gets noticed on a wide scale.
Take this argument further and is there still the same encouragement for innovators to give it a go, as we did in the early 2000s, when we realize that our work might never be seen, or if it is to be seen, we need deep pockets to get it seen?
Maybe we need to encourage people to go away from these walled gardens, to find ways to promote the passionate voices again. Maybe a future search engine—or a current one that sees the light—could have a search specifically for these so we’re not reliant on the same old voices and the same old sites. And I’m sure there are other ways besides. For I see little point in posting on places that lack ‘charisma’, as you put it. They just don’t excite me as much as discovering a blog I really like, and sticking with it. With Facebook’s personal sharing down 25 and 29 per cent in 2015 and 2016 respectively, there is a shift away from uninspiring, privacy-destroying places. Hopefully we can catch them at more compelling and interesting blogs and make them feel at home.
Thanks Jack, great to read about your own background in blogging! Plus you made some excellent points about the current state of blogging.
Good on you for continuing to blog at your own site too. I’m keen to get back into regular blogging myself, although I’d like it to be a less formal style (since my formal articles are now going up on Newsroom every week).
I miss those days too. I just recently turned socialfish.org into mostly a job board, probably my final acceptance that the good old days of blogging are gone.
Thanks Maddie. Shame about socialfish.org, but glad to hear it still has a revenue stream.