If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
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Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#2Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built in, who knows.
fwiw I don't see Medium as being a replacement for blogs. It's gotten quite bad from a user standpoint and kills the relationship with the reader in the same way that "blogging" on Linkedin or Facebook does (not quite as bad because at least it's findable on the open web).
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#3Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built…
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Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#4Well you can have a link to my unsuccessful unfocused blog. I have posted fairly recently though. Software music mountaineering etc http://omnisplore.wordpress.com
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#5Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built…
I don't think blogs are dead, just hidden from view. That's why I obsessively bookmark blogs when I see them posted to HN or Reddit, since I know I'll never be able to find them again if I lose the link.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#6I am still blogging [0][1]. And I thought static blog generators where quite the thing, I even wrote my own [2].
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#7I am still blogging [0][1]. And I thought static blog generators where quite the thing, I even wrote my own [2]. [0] https://plurrrr.com/ [1] http://johnbokma.com/blog/ [2] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
Same here. It may be basic and crappy, but if you want to read an unsuccessful blog with no attempt at monetization or ads or even visitor counting, mine[1] is where you should feel right at home.
But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.
Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.
[1] https://lucgommans.nl/blog
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#8I moved mine from Wordpress to GitHub pages, and basically stopped using it; I could either pay Wordpress to not show gross ads, or host a mostly static site on GitHub.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#9Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built…
Remember E/N sites? Everything/nothing. Just a blip.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#10> The other day I searched for an hour and couldn't find even one. They used to be endless.
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.