What Made Blogging Different?
Blogging was a different medium - and there's still a need for it more than ever.
[Elizabeth Spiers in Talking Points Memo]
Elizabeth Spiers nails what was — and is — amazing about blogging:
“If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.”
The result was a constellation of individual outlets, writing on a cadence that was divorced from the news cycle, often about topics that were highly personal that nobody else would necessarily cover. One person would write a piece, then another would write a post referencing that piece, and the conversation would continue from site to site to site. Each site may have been centered around an individual, but it was a group, community activity. Even the word “blog” is predicated on that idea: a play on words that took us from weblog to “we blog”.
As Elizabeth notes, newsletters are a form of that same medium, although the prevalence of paid subscriptions has added a layer that maybe isn’t as conducive to distributed conversation. They’re definitely not dead: I’ve been continuously blogging since 1998 (although not on the same site), and many others have too.
Hopefully we’ll continue to see a resurgence? If you’re reading this, I’d love to read your thoughts in long-form, too. I'd love nothing more than to see slow, long-form conversation bloom on the web once again.
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