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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

#61

Post by decasteve »

When the perception of what’s out there is filtered through so few sources, then it’s bound to be skewed. The blogosphere is as vibrant as ever. The blogs that have staying power, that are well done, are still there. Finding them through search engines is not going to provide you with the instant discovery you’re looking for.

HackerNews and other niche sites, word-of-mouth, and serendipity, play a bigger role in blog discovery for me. It’s a slow process but the results are stronger.

There’s no instant tech-effort solution to this in my opinion. If you want a good blog to stick around, express your thanks and gratitude to the blogger. Buy them a coffee. Encourage them.

Go now to your favourite blogger and send them a message of appreciation.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#62

Post by okareaman »

pmlnr wrote: post #50
okareaman wrote: post #40

I blog on Facebook and it works really well for me because I have a built in audience that is interested in what I have to say. I can tell stories about my life that my kids and parents enjoy. I have no need for NSFW posts. I avoid politics. I keep it fun and interesting. Hot takes on local issues sometimes. I have 60 followers who I don't know and don't understand why they follow me, although I do try to explain the…

> I blog on Facebook That is not a blog. You don't have control over it, you don't have archives, and it's not world readable. None of what you listed is a reason to not to use a real blog.

I'm not sure how you define a blog. Could you clarify? I often delete or edit posts, so I have control. I download my FB data so I have an archive. I have a link to my FB on my Twitter and all my posts are public and I get people from Twitter reading it. I have 60 followers I don't know who read it. Not sure what else it needs to be to meet your definition of a blog.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#63

Post by alisonatwork »

gk1 wrote: post #12

Today’s vlogs are similar to the blogs of 10 years ago. They’re day-in-the-life snippets from normal people doing mundane or semi-interesting things. Some of them are famous and are run like businesses with financial motives, but most aren’t. And you can find vlogs on all kinds of topics: travel, parenting, running, and even unicycling. If you miss the old days of blogging I think you’ll enjoy watching vlogs.

The main problem I have with vlogs (and podcasts for that matter) is that they are linear, and they are long. When I read a blog, I can skim, scan for keywords, I can take it at my own pace. It's a very different experience, even if the raw content is the same.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#64

Post by dewey »

ljm wrote: post #51
dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round. I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site gener…

Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#65

Post by Nextgrid »

christiansakai wrote: post #36
ordinaryradical wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.

I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this? Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content. I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.

I recently checked out Write.as and it fits the bill. It’s a paid blogging platform (the backend is open source so you can self-host).

Svbtle is also good if you don’t mind mandatory Google Analytics that you can’t disable (I left the platform because of that).

Squarespace can also be used as a blog although it’s more general-purpose than just blogging and a bit more expensive as a result.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#66

Post by cameronbrown »

angel_j wrote: post #39

We should be able to dial up folks' computers directly and look inside their /public or /www folder.

Normal people don't have computers anymore.

This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#67

Post by NicoJuicy »

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

I have an entire setup for crawling rss hourly

http://handlr.sapico.me

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#68

Post by petercooper »

krapht wrote: post #15

Blogs exist, they just morphed. People with things to say moved to platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, or Medium. This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability. Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve t…

Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.

I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger.

Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from other blogs whether by being referenced in a post, via a sidebar link, or via a webring or similar device. Getting over 100 visitors a day to your blog would be a big deal! Getting other bloggers' attention via linking to them was a big part of things or leaving comments on their blog. These things barely move the needle anymore.

While I have a lot of nostalgia for those days, I think there's actually a lot of other ways to be discovered now. Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Designer News, etc. provide opportunities to be found within various sub-communities. Most people have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles on which they can share their links, often findable via hashtags people are monitoring. There are 1001 email newsletters that are always seeking out interesting things to link to.

So, I dunno, is discovery really a problem nowadays? I don't think it is, but maybe I'm too "in the game" to see the problems people are having with it. If anything, I think there's just too much to do nowadays and we're really competing with there being 100x more people online than 20 years ago.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#69

Post by pmlnr »

ss64 wrote: post #19

Blogs died when blog specific search engines disappeared, particularly 'Google Blog search' which was quietly killed off in 2014. Technorati the other popular option for searching blogs, also went dark in 2014.

This is so weird to read. As a rare language native (Hungarian) I was never part of The Glorious Blogsphere That One Day Disappeared. I ran my blog because I wanted to make it, to tinker with it, to write, to create.

Those that went dark only because search engines now don't find them feel like they never done it for these values.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#70

Post by [deleted] »

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

[deleted]
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