Today is my fifteenth blogging anniversary!
Well, at least that’s how long I’ve been blogging on insanityworks.org using syndicated blogging software. Before that I would add occasional life updates to a couple of static pages on this site.
Screenshot of an old webpage with a block of text titled “Summer/Winter 2006 onwards: Melbourne Business School”.
It’s been interesting to see how internet communication has changed over the years that I’ve been doing this. We started with plain blogging (with blog rings for discovery and RSS for pull notifications) and then added microblogging, photo sharing, videoblogging, podcasts, and now mailing lists.
Interest in longform personal blogging dropped off many years ago thanks to the rise of
microblogging (tweets take so much less effort to write),
photo sharing (super easy to share just a photo with a caption), and
video blogging (simultaneously both easier and more difficult to do).
The shuttering of Google Reader only sped things along.
At the same time commercialisation got a lot of personal bloggers to start blogging professionally instead.
Now podcasting is following a similar trajectory: we’ve gone from lots of small personal podcasts to increasingly commercial interests muscling in to this space. And what are TikTok videos if not a mashup of microblogs and video blogs?
Long exposure photo of a train going down a track behind some trees.
There has been movement in both directions though. People write lengthy, threaded microblogs which are basically just longform blogs split into small paragraphs. And lots of branding- and commercially-minded people have moved their writing to subscription-only mailing lists instead of public blogs. So the era of longer writing is having a bit of a comeback.
That said, us personal bloggers have kept on keeping on all these years. There were lean times during which I didn’t blog much, yes, but I’ve been pretty consistent these last few years. And I’m quite happy with the volume and quality of my current blogging output.
So here’s to fifteen more years!