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Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

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Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#331

Post by carlosjobim »

biztos wrote: post #195
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.

Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention. I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes e…

> And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#333

Post by pessimizer »

> This is a largely non-commercial movement.

That's strange, because literally the only place I see blogs being back is on Substack. And the only way to get people to visit Substack is through social media; twitter, really. You start a Substack when you get good at twitter, then you start doing podcasts and cross-promotion after your Substack starts doing well.

I actually like this, except that the platforms are all pretty much monopolies in their spaces. But it's very commercial. 10000 people paying $2 a month, and you can make a nice living.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#334

Post by bikelang »

SoftTalker wrote: post #327
ghaff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.

I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up. I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand…

My blog is probably more detrimental to my “brand” than helpful. I also couldn’t care less about the self-promotion or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis. I write exclusively for me.

If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#335

Post by Peteragain »

xtiansimon wrote: post #274
Peteragain wrote: post #250

I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive t…

I took a MOOC course for teachers which advocated long form blogging for course assignments + social media short posts with appropriate tags to publicize/connect with classmates. At the time they suggested using Twitter or Facebook. And while I had a twitter account, I rarely used it. Over the period of the course, I managed to cultivate a nice community out of a largely unused account, and connected with like minded…

Thanks for sharing. I think that, today, Ross is wrong and there is another way.. much like (I think) you are describing.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#336

Post by Peteragain »

croisillon wrote: post #252
Peteragain wrote: post #250

I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive t…

blog softwares should facilitate the production of a feed river: what a specific author likes is sometimes as valuable, or more, as what they write

Yes. The challenge is to understand how the river comes about, and at the same time, preventing it being gamed by vested interests.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#337

Post by pessimizer »

adiian wrote: post #254

IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating centralized ways to distribute information. They started by killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on what you see. They all start in the same way, making it convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you change your habits, they make it in such a way…

> IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media.

They were killed by search engines not indexing them anymore. Search engines are now curated guides that have nothing to do with the search engines of the past, which were basically just grep. Their purpose now is to direct you to revenue generating products, and they will simply change or ignore your query in order to do that. Individual people doing individual things are of no interest to the money machine.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#338

Post by SoftTalker »

caseyohara wrote: post #318
wkat4242 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people. I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my read…

This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.

Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon but it's not inconceivable.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#339

Post by SoftTalker »

the_gipsy wrote: post #199
simonw wrote: post #88

Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…

Do you use AI to write content nowadays? Or to review and format it?

I don't see the point in using AI to blog. If I want to read what AI has to say about a topic, I'll just ask the AI directly.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#340

Post by hdjrudni »

simonw wrote: post #95
Brajeshwar wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?” Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will…

I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.

Past-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's the one little piece of evidence that maybe I have actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.
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