This is less about nostalgia than it is survival. Search engines fail and AI floods the void with slop. Human curation becomes essential infrastructure. We need directories. We need blogrolls. We need people pointing to other people.
'survival' above nostalgia. It needs separate (federated?) infrastructure, esp for discovery.
Joan Westenberg on blogging
The blog won't save us. But it's one of the tools we'll need if we're going to save ourselves.
Blogs as self care
Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of having a room of one's own: physical space for creative work, free from interruption and control. A blog is a room of your own on the internet. It's a place where you decide what to write about and how to write about it,
A room of one's own (Virginia Woolf) digitally is a blog. Disagree, bc it's public, which is the opposite. It is a window on the output of that room.
And the fragmentation of social media is actually creating demand for alternatives. Every time a platform implodes (Twitter's ongoing collapse, Instagram's slow retirement // decay into a metaphorical Floridian condo, TikTok's uncertain status, Facebook's demographic hollowing) people start looking for more stable ground. The infrastructure exists. It's waiting.
I do think there's more people who get fed up with the empty carbs of socmed yes. I also think they don't see alternatives, def not writing for themselves at any length. An issue is that bringing in all those people doesn't scale the writing. At first everyone blogged bc that was how you participated in the conversation, so it attracted those that were ok with writing
Newsletters are still a discovery layer, no matter how many people pronounce their untimely death. You can write on your own site and distribute via email, getting the permanence of a blog with the push distribution of a newsletter. The writing lives at your domain; the email is notification infrastructure.
newsletters seem to still work well imo. Consistency and rhythm is a challenge though.
RSS never actually died.
RSS is plumbing so it's invisible to most. My team doesn't realise there's an easy way to follow my blog. Readersoftware isn't common anymore.
Search engines still index blogs far better than social media posts. A well-written blog post on a specific topic can draw readers for year
blogposts still get indexed well by search engines, and certainly way better than socmed utterings.
I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they've moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. These are people who used to produce ten-thousand-word explorations of complex topics, and now they produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each one optimized for immediate engagement and none of them building toward anything coherent.
Sees bloggers switching to socmed or substack and impoverishing themselves intellectually in the process.
Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration
In contrast socmed stuff is declarative, taking up a position to only get opposition.
Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning "attempts" or "tries." The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated.The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne's direct descendant.
Blogging as essays, attempts to put something into words, acknowledging the uncertainty.
Everything I produce has to compete, in real-time, with everything else that could possibly occupy that user's attention.
Platform stuff is in a competition for attention. And that is its only purpose.
When I write a blog post, I'm writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they're interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who's made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.
blogging has an imagined audience, and any output can be referred to.
The platform has no interest in whether your post is found next week or next year; it has a vested interest in keeping users scrolling through new content right now.
platforms have no interest in permanence, only in engagement in the now
But it also produced actual intellectual communities. Remember those?People wrote long responses to each other's posts, those responses generated further responses, and you could follow the thread of an argument across multiple sites and weeks of discussion. The format rewarded careful thinking because careful thinking was legible in a way that it simply isn't on platforms designed for rapid-fire engagement.
describing the distributed conversations that were important to me for blogging too. Not sure we were as exalted though.
And I think the fix, or at least part of it = going backwards to a technology we've largely abandoned: the blog, humble // archaic as it may seem.
Blog as a more prudent way to spread ideas than the twitter type short messages
Baldur Bjarnason notices that a number of the 1200 (!) blogs he follows which are normally dormant have become active again, but on the topic of AI if not generated by AI. By the original blogger. Blandness ensues.
Reading back all those old posts and weeknotes I have here is super nice and reminds me:Keeping a record of things is really valuable. Just write and trust that it will come in handy at some point.I used to do so many things in a given week. Compared to what I’m doing now, my life was insanely eventful.I was consistently (too) early on a lot of things. For instance: I read myself complaining about restaurants and food in Amsterdam, something which is mostly solved now.
Like myself Alper is his own most frequent reader of his blog. Mentions realising how much he did in a week earlier in his life. Same for me, things that now might be a big thing in a week, were Tuesday afternoon 15yrs ago. It's not just age I suspect, but also an overall attenuation that Covid brought?
https://web.archive.org/web/20251229105350/https://alper.nl/blog/18730/
[[Alper Çuğun p]] moving away from WordPress to Hugo / markdown.
I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square
Vgl Blogging as front porch https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2004/05/your_blog_is_yo/ very 2004!
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.
There was social symmetry. If you wanted to be nasty you had to do it on your own site. Consequences were for yourself. Why on things like Mastodon I prefer small to tiny instances, so that the people on an instance have the same sense of social symmetry and give and take come from the same social distance.
The growth of social media in particular has wiped out a particular kind of blogging that I sometimes miss: a text-based dialogue between bloggers that required more thought and care than dashing off 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the dialogue, you had to invest some effort
Indeed, blogs as distributed conversations. Still on the hunt for that effect.
What made blogging different, by Elizabeth Spiers (cofounder of Gawker in 2002)
Jeremy Keith on the importance of blog responses on people's own blogs. It makes it symmetric and a conversation, making misbehaving basically a non-thing. He asks about not showing webmentions of likes and boosts. I keep them for discovery, so that other readers maybe connect to eachother.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250630193609/https://taylor.town/
'my website is ugly because I made it'. Interesting approach for the front page. Breaking up the blog feel. I can see something like this for my own site, vgl [[0 Tondriaan dtd]] which I 2021/2 attempted but was too structured really. Why not unstructured. And then add a few zones that do what I wanted the structure to do before. (tagged WP bc I use wp, not bc the site is in wp)
The more friction existed, the higher the stakes felt to me, and the more it seemed like I needed to have something very important and worthwhile to say before I could (should) blog about it.
Friction can forestall writing. I've moved to blogging from inside my Obsidian notes through micropub, rather than using the WP back-end. Gives me two things: the back-end pushed me to only write when I had time to finish, the notes allow multiple writings in parallel, and publishing is one key click.
Tracy Durnell on the personal affordances of keeping a blog. Haven't read just glanced, but usually she makes interesting points, marked to read -[ ] Read this wrt #pkm #15mins
via [[Euan Semple]]
If you're going to write something that means something, you gotta put your own most urgent questions into it.
Meaningful writing needs a driving personally urgent question. Sounds about right. Meaningful to whom though, and urgent at what scale? I think my own more continuous urgent questions feed into my company and the 'carrying' themes throughout my blogging, and sound through in how I share my ideas and stories in client orgs. In my blogging 'urgent' can be a few minutes thing, or a thing over a week, urging me to blog something in the now. It is forceful but temporary and localised. Vgl formulering v [[% Interessevelden 20200523102304]] [[Holding questions 20091015123253]]
Even when the conversation isn’t direct, blogging is community the way neighborhoods are — you don’t know everyone who lives nearby, everyone’s got a slightly different set of connections, but living in the same environment where common concerns might arise and sharing just some of these cross connections to hear rumblings through the grapevine means ideas and vibes will diffuse through.
Vgl 'blogging as hanging out on your frontporch' of 2004. https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2004/05/your_blog_is_yo/ en founding a city in cyberspace https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2004/06/founding_a_city/
The network is vital for blogging, too. Social media is fading as it shifts more and more towards the few who post and the many who follow; But the more effort I make to link out to others on my blog, the more I feel included as a part of the online community.
To me blogging is conversation, and the network explosion is its main purpose. This reminds me of my early posting about follow/followers ration on Twitter https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2023/03/conversational-symmetry-redux/ which refs my 2008 post on it. Durnell points to the loss of conversational symmetry on socmed platforms. Pro-actively creating your own conversational symmetry is key here.
While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling.
Social media as performance, blogs as voice. Especially over longer periods of time, blogs become a qualitatively different thing, where the social media timelines remain the same. Vgl [[Blogs als avatar 20030731084659]] https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/08/your-blog-is-your-avatar/ Personal relationships are the stuff of our lives.
Tracy Durnell on her shift to more [[People Centered Navigation 20060930163901]]
Adding The Post Title To My “Reply By Email” Button
I wonder if that would increase responses to my blog as Kev indicates. There might be those who will respond in e-mail, but not in a public comment. Worth a try.
At the same time, like Harold, I’ve realised that it is important to do things, to keep blogging and writing in this space. Not because of its sheer brilliance, but because most of it will be crap, and brilliance will only occur once in a while. You need to produce lots of stuff to increase the likelihood of hitting on something worthwile. Of course that very much feeds the imposter cycle, but it’s the only way. Getting back into a more intensive blogging habit 18 months ago, has helped me explore more and better. Because most of what I blog here isn’t very meaningful, but needs to be gotten out of the way, or helps build towards, scaffolding towards something with more meaning.
Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.
Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.
How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?
The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?
Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.
Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.
Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.
How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?
How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.
the classic idea of blogging as thinking out loud, but here with others.
Alan pointed to the same notion elsewhere. Blogging should be more about open ended curiosity and holding questionsm than about explaining or sharing ones coherent worldview or current truth about something. This with an eye to the former being a better prompt for conversations. I agree that conversations (distributed ones, taking place over multiple blogs) are a key thing in blogging. I also believe in the 'obligation to explain' as ruk.ca says: if you have figured something out, created something, you have a civic duty to explain it so others may find their way to their solution faster. (this annotation is also meant as a test to see how it ends up in hypothes.is and gets sync'd or not to my notes locally.