

I Miss the Old Blogosphere - RougeFemme
http://gigaom.com/2014/04/27/sometimes-i-miss-the-old-blogosphere-weve-gained-a-lot-but-weve-also-lost-some-valuable-things/?curator=MediaREDEF

======
elliottcarlson
As kijin mentions in their comment, maintaining your blog was a labor of love
- personally I miss the old internet - the early days, when it was a wild wild
west, when my internet time was still divided with my BBS time. Everything
grows up, and as things become more popular, they become more mainstream and
open up to wider audiences. I know those old days are gone (and very fondly
remembered) but I also know that what was my favorite past time has become a
great career - one I can wake up to every morning, eager to do my job. There
is a lot more noise out there now as all of this has become common, and there
are millions of blogs - but there are still great ones out there, worth
following and consuming - and hopefully the noise learns to not be uniform and
figure out their own identities, and appeal properly to the consumers. I am
thankful for how things have evolved, even when wistful.

------
asharpe
Is this a result of the success of the 'old blogosphere' and mirroring the
challenges of monetization so many tech companies are challenged by.

1\. build an audience 2\. start monetising 3\. quit your job 4\. drive more
audience and try to monetise

Quickly, you end up serving the monetisation and the soft money that goes to
influential bloggers to say nice things. It's sad, but unfortunately not the
first time an industry/content/company has lost it's core success and function
as a result of the need to pay the bills.

How to overcome this and stay independent? That's the exciting challenge!

------
kijin
> _there are still independent voices blogging on Medium and other sites ..._

Medium is just another proprietary platform that is trying to create a walled
garden. Their garden is impeccably curated and looks fantastic on mobile, but
it's a walled garden just the same.

Speaking of walled gardens, one thing that I find especially suffocating about
today's "blogosphere" is the uncanny uniformity of design, typography, and
overall structure that everyone seems to be adopting. Every Medium blog looks
the same. Ditto for every svbtle blog, and pretty much every other blogging
platform that has appeared in the last few years. Gone are the insane
customizability of BlogSpot and Tumblr. Now as soon as a blog loads, I can
tell "Yeah, it's just another svbtle blog. Gotta move my mouse away from that
weird Kudos button!"

The new services fly banners like "we let you focus on your content" and "just
write, don't worry about anything else", but what they really insinuate is the
flawed assumption that your literal words are the only thing that you will
ever want to communicate to your audience. Not the design. Not the typography.
Not the way you organize your content. Not even your own personalized domain
name. In exchange for a bit of convenience, they give you a uniform to wear.
And just in case you don't like the uniform, they tell you that it is a symbol
of honor and prestige (because only the best bloggers are invited to wear it,
etc.)

In the past, I used to browse random blogs when I wanted inspiration for a new
web design. Every blog was different. Sure, they often looked amateurish, but
they were always packed with unique ideas about what a blog could look like
and behave. People took care of their blogs the same way they took care of
their gardens, the same way they customized their MySpace page to the limit,
the same way that some of us even today spend several hours customizing the
shell prompt. Maintaining your blog was a labor of love, and the efforts
showed through the clunky tabless windows of IE 6.

When you sell your home and lease a condo, it's not just ownership that you're
giving up. You're also giving up personalization. After all, every condo looks
the same from the outside; and you're not really supposed to know what goes on
inside, either. All these years we've been chanting the mantra, "Content comes
first." By "content" we've usually meant words, and nothing but words.
Everything else is at the service of words. But when taken to the extreme,
even you yourself become a servant of your words. You become nothing but a
bunch of words, as if all your readers were autistic.

~~~
dredmorbius
I actually vastly prefer design which emphases text.

As contrasts: Blogspot's dynamic themes are utterly unusable for me. I can't
read them, I can't navigate through them, and worst of all: I can't take a
page and render it in Readability. As a result, I simply avoid those blogs.

Svtble and Medium are good (though the Kudos spot is a bug and I remove it via
local CSS).

Otherwise, if every page on the Internet looked like a Readability rendering,
I'd rejoice.

------
dustinupdyke
The clip art in this post is distracting and does not add to the overall text.

