On Blogging (unfinished)

Why blog? It's 2022. 

Blogs are an online phenomenon of bygone decades. Once, they dominated the internet, to the extent unaffiliated people writing/posting on their own sites can be said to dominate a space. Blogs are still around in commercial form, but they have long since ceded prominence to podcasts and social media, which reign today as the premier channels by which people self-publish material online. 

Substack is the popular channel/platform for writers right now. It's like a blog, except instead of posts to a website, the writer publishes email newsletters. While blogs can generate of revenue from advertisers, Substack is set up so readers subscribe directly to their favorite writers. Historically there are many middle men publisher-types between person writing and the person paying for the writing. Substack seems to work well for a lot of writers. As for me, I don't have an audience that will pay me to send them emails, even though I like the idea of sending writing directly to the intended reader. A blog is something I can easily make and take down in case I post outrageous opinions that embarrass my later self.

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"Blog," you may know, is short for "web log." Someone coined the term in 1997. This platform, Blogspot, which is now part of Google, was created in 1999. Before circa 2010, blogs were huge. Many earned a profit. Most did not, of course, as blogs of all kinds proliferated across the internet. No-name individuals had personal blogs. See this site. Well-known professionals made their own blogs. See Prof. Tyler Cowen and Marginal Revolution, my favorite blog. People made names for themselves by the blogs they created. The blogs people visit today are often legacies from this golden age when blogs were the predominant format for self-publishing online. 

A blog is a website on which the owner posts a combination of text and images. The subject matter may range from narrative fiction to nonfiction and documentary genres of all kinds. These posts are published sequentially in chronological order; hence, the "log" part of "weblog." Unlike social media, which uses an algorithm to deliver content to your personal feed, the audience for a blog is limited to the number of people who visit the site. The posts just sit there, waiting for their URLs to be distributed or their pages otherwise visited. 

Most blogs have a theme. The theme can be "my personal blog" with posts about whatever was on the author's mind at the time. The theme can be professional, like finance or law. It can be hobby-centric, like posts all about a certain activity or adventure. Travel blogs were huge. Food blogs. Mom blogs. People would make content for blogs as an end in itself, and others would make content for their blog to keep friends and family apprised of goings-on around the world. People would make a blog before they went abroad for a semester. My friend's dad made a blog after he was diagnosed with cancer, and shared profound insight from his experience dealing with an aggressive cancer.

I see a blog as a third zone for casual writing somewhere in between letters to people and a book. It's a modern format for our time.

Unfinished