Blogging. It was a huge part of my life almost two decades ago during grad school and kept me sane through law school, but then all of that sort of fell by the wayside as I started working and suddenly had very little free time, not to mention the fact that I suddenly had to be much more careful saying anything about how I spent the bulk of my time and mental energy. At the same time, blogging sort of got swallowed up by the rise of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the cell phone era of apps for everything diverting the energy and creative output of bloggers into those platforms and silos. It kind of started to seem like personal blogs were going to be one of those internet things like MySpace or LiveJournal that were big for a while, but then just faded into the Internet Archive.
But now…
I would like to think there is energy in this space again, possibility. The idea started to take shape a few weeks ago when Daring Fireball linked to the [ooh! Directory](https://ooh.directory), a new directory of blogs. A new directory of blogs? What? Really? And I started thinking… Could it be time?
It’s been so long, though; so long that I couldn’t even remember how to log in to the imbroglio. You certainly can’t call yourself a blogger if you can’t even log in to your blog, now can you? But while 20 years ago there were probably thousands of people who would have claimed to be bloggers, how many people now would claim that title? Times have changed so much that it’s a little hard to see how blogs can survive today. Back then, when everyone was posting regularly on their own sites, the currency was links. You link to me, see the link and the traffic, I read your site and link to you, someone else sees that and links to us both, and so on, so that every little site could hope to attract a few readers and partiicpate in a conversation with other people who were interested in similar things.
Is that happening now? Could it happen again?
I have no idea. Nearly all of the blogs I once followed are either dormant and have been for years (often a decade or more), or they are simply dead links. Yet blogging continues, and has been happening all these years, with OGs like Dave Winer at Scripting News, and Kottke and Daring Fireball itself, writing and posting and linking, again and again and again. Those well-known sites write to massive audiences, but they still inspire and foster the indpendent, can-do spirit that has always been at the heart of blogging. Just yesterday Winer linked to Tantek Çelik’s argument for what is essentially blogging — posting your own content on your own site in your own way. Çelik calls it the “#IndieWeb” while Winer just wants to call it the Web, but either way, it amounts to the same thing —there really is nothing like the freedom and fun and potential that comes from creating and building and maintaining your own home on the internet. It’s fun, there’s a good argument that it’s important, and there really is nothing like it.
All of which is to say, I may be a weasel overcome with dinge, but… Hello world.