Blogging, when introduced, was marvelous. People sharing their personal takes and learnings, unfettered by the desire to earn from them.
If you were into bicycles, you find a blog by a cycling-fanatic and start following along and engaging (remember inter-blog "pings"?). If you were into any topic, you could find enthusiasts writing on it. And it'd have a bit of personal touch, which is very valuable!
"Planets" were great as a starting point, and you still have those at Planet Gnome (I think one of the original ones, at least it had custom software done for it), Planet Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora...
It was the true decentralised discussion forum bliss that Internet always promised!
Alas, platforms like Blogger and Wordpress actually diminished the true essence because they promoted siloing in.
And being there from early on, I can promise you that "blogs" (web logs) were not personal diaries put public. People did that a long time before blogs and called them, surprisingly, diaries.
It was already a point where web was becoming too big, and search engines were becoming useless, so it was, imho, a "log of the web" — every early blog post was pointing to a hidden gem elsewhere on the web which you'd never reach through a search engine. It's just that the term was taken and switched to "any regularly updated set of articles" without any other constraints (technical or topical) that defined the early blogs. As if that did not exist before "blogs".
Blogging, when introduced, was marvelous. People sharing their personal takes and learnings, unfettered by the desire to earn from them.
If you were into bicycles, you find a blog by a cycling-fanatic and start following along and engaging (remember inter-blog "pings"?). If you were into any topic, you could find enthusiasts writing on it. And it'd have a bit of personal touch, which is very valuable!
"Planets" were great as a starting point, and you still have those at Planet Gnome (I think one of the original ones, at least it had custom software done for it), Planet Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora...
It was the true decentralised discussion forum bliss that Internet always promised!
Alas, platforms like Blogger and Wordpress actually diminished the true essence because they promoted siloing in.
And being there from early on, I can promise you that "blogs" (web logs) were not personal diaries put public. People did that a long time before blogs and called them, surprisingly, diaries.
It was already a point where web was becoming too big, and search engines were becoming useless, so it was, imho, a "log of the web" — every early blog post was pointing to a hidden gem elsewhere on the web which you'd never reach through a search engine. It's just that the term was taken and switched to "any regularly updated set of articles" without any other constraints (technical or topical) that defined the early blogs. As if that did not exist before "blogs".