Not so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author’s favorite blogs.
Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger.
It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies.
But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process.
Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking.
That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.
Links sections were awesome, and made the web feel deeper than it really was. You could go on dives just clicking through and finding so much cool stuff. Plus if it was a hobby site, there was inherently some level of curation - I don't think anybody would be linking to any of the hundreds of lookalike SEO "blogs" nowadays if it weren't for search engines allowing themselves to be gamed.
Nowadays if it's not on the first "page" of Google (well, whatever the first group of infinite scrolling results is called) it might as well not exist. Makes the web feel flatter and less like a, well, web.
Webrings and some called them "Affiliates" (I dont know where the name came from, it makes more sense in Spanish, not sure in English), but they had this 82x32 buttons on the sidebar (sometimes anitmated GIFs) to similar websites, usually websites handled by friends.
Blogrolls could be either very freeform, or very topical, depending on the blog and the blog author, but they did the job--if you liked that blog, chances were pretty good you'd find something interesting in the blogroll.
I do still see "ads" on these sorts of blogs, but not at all the same type of ad as elsewhere. There are a few "ad networks" that are just free promotion for various other web revival sites, e.g. https://wsmz.gay/#misc-bannerlink
I quite love it, especially when it fits with the site's aesthetic.
I planned to do something similar to it on my blog. The idea being using that page as a public bookmark list. It would contain anything from books to blog posts to youtube videos.
Not so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author’s favorite blogs.
I remember this but I also remember it wasn't called this. (Because in my local English that sounds like bog roll, meaning toilet paper, so I'm sure that would have stuck).
Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger.
It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies.
But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process.
Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking.
That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.