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Blogs used to be different

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Re: Blogs used to be different

#31

Post by watwut »

maplethorpe wrote: post #4

> We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal. I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt s…

I think it is more a matter of someone confusing own bubbule with how everyone acts.

Overwhelming majority of people did not had journal and it was not any more normal to wrote every day then it is now.

It is true that people were not able predict true extend of online harassment. But again, plenty people now are completely oblivious to what mobs do.

Re: Blogs used to be different

#32

Post by wduquette »

It’s true. I remember the glory days of the “Blogosphere”: the Truth-Laid Bear’s blog ecosystem (I was a finny fish at one point, IIRC), USS Clueless, 2Blowhards, servers going down under the weight of an Instalanche, and many many others. Some are still around; I see posts from Iowahawk once in a while. But it wasn’t all personal diaries. There were pundits, essayists about every topic, diarists; me, I reviewed books. It was a heady time, and great fun.

Re: Blogs used to be different

#33

Post by wduquette »

theturtle wrote: post #20

Well, yeah. But some of us were there before the beginning. Wordpress? Huh? You wrote your own code or you just wrote raw HTML. 1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions. My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't…

I was the first person I knew to learn HTML; that was in the mid-90’s. I had a personal website from December of 1996, where I posted mostly book reviews; later it evolved into a hand-coded blog, followed by MovableType, followed by WordPress, which I still use.

Re: Blogs used to be different

#34

Post by AuthAuth »

I find myself wanting blogging to be more popular but struggling to justify why it should be. For my own personal site I want to share stuff about myself but also dont because of privacy. I've settled on technical-ish writeups about stuff im working on but thats hard as fuck to produce.

Re: Blogs used to be different

#35

Post by fivestones »

bdcravens wrote: post #24

I don't remember when I first heard the term "blog", but it must have been around 2001 or so because I had a page on my personal site that was blog.cfm (I think people were still often using the longer form "weblog" to refer to them). It was a series of entries, with a date, and was mostly tech musings with some personal updates mixed in. https://web.archive.org/web/20011129084149/http://mr-bill.ne... (I hereby disav…

I love that your last post (as of that archive date at least) linked to Telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Re: Blogs used to be different

#36

Post by stevekemp »

elric wrote: post #28
silicon5 wrote: post #23

In the late 90s and early 00s, blogs were originally "weblogs" or "web logs", just a sort of online diary. It was mainly something you wrote, rather than something for others to read. Over time, the most interesting blogs became the most popular, and these were generally blogs on a fixed topic. The meaning of "blog" shifted to refer to these high-quality regularly-updated article sites, more like a magazine. It becam…

1997-1998ish I helped run a site with a bunch of forums. Regular members could request their own Diary forum, which worked exactly the way blogs would work later on. Some were literal diaries, others became grand works of fiction, some were collaborative storytelling, some favoured pictures etc. It saddens me that many people feel the need to seemingly monetize their creative outlet.

And back in the day sites like kuro5hin and even slashdot, allowed their users to have a public diary, or scratchpad.

Then there were sites like Advogato which were built around diaries as well as reputations.

Re: Blogs used to be different

#37

Post by theshrike79 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #16
username223 wrote: post #10

> blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's OPSEC has nothing to do with it. People used pseudonyms by default in the 1990s, and blocked Doubleclick (a.k.a. Google) in their ~/.hosts files. Blogs were non-commercial places where we worked out ideas and offered useful information.

Lots of people used real names on Usenet at least into the 1990s. It probably changed with eternal September.

A quarter century old Usenet posts are pretty much the only non-work related place where my name exists on the Internet. There are a few stragglers, but not many any more.

Re: Blogs used to be different

#38

Post by wduquette »

There were lots of blogs that were personal diaries back in the early days; but there were always many blogs the weren't. The first "web log", in my opinion, was the page at NCSA, home of the Mosaic browser, that was literally a log of new web servers coming on-line. I used to go there daily to see what was new. (Later I used Yahoo for that purpose; and not much later than that I gave up. :-)

Another big site for early blogging was Dave Winer's "Scripting News", in which he talked about Frontier and Radio Userland, two early web platforms. Winer was also responsible for "EditThisPage", the first web site I ever saw that allowed editing a website on another server through the browser. It was followed by Weblogs.com, which hosted some of the earliest blogs. I had one there, briefly.

And then, of course, there was GeoCities, where you explicitly picked your "city" based on the kinds of things you were going to be writing about. Blogging was always extremely hetergeneous.

What we didn't have in the early days was monetization or, naturally, an intense focus on monetization.

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