Ten years of weblogging.
In which I celebrate over 3,650 days of posting links, along with the handful of surviving EditThisPage alumni who haven’t either: a. found better things to do, or b. been devoured by Twitter.
Lots of decade retrospectives are starting to show up on the web; likely more will show up the week before New Year’s. I’ll stick my neck out, and propose that when you look at the past decade, the Naughts should be called ‘the decade of the weblogger.’ Every event of the past ten years has been thoroughly recorded, editorialized and posted by someone with a weblog. We helped shift newsgathering from paper, radio and television to much faster, more flexible online sources.
Who remembers all the events of the last ten years? Our weblogs do. We had better archives than the news media, for a while … and ours were free. The fear and panic over Y2K was a notable first online ‘crisis’ I recall. The tragic Concorde crash. The Cerro Grande Fire in New Mexico. The stultifying Gore/Bush election. The Bush inauguration. Launch of Wikipedia. 9/11. The war on Afghanistan. Harry Potter’s debut in film. Multiple Wall Street dips and crashes. Passage of the Homeland Security Bill. Loss of the Shuttle Columbia (right over New Mexico). The War on Iraq. Death of Reagan. Abu Ghraib. Tsunami in Indonesia. Death of John Paul II. Hurricane Katrina. Dan Rather. Abramoff. North Korea’s sabre rattling. Cheney. Scooter Libby. The endless 2008 election season. Obama/McCain/Palin/Biden. Iran’s nuclear intentions. Michael Jackson. Tiger Woods. Just to name a few events that come to mind.
God, the crap we’ve been through. No wonder I’m happy to see the end of the Naughts. Our archives of the last ten years will be valuable to future historians, if noone else.
Why did I do it? Why weblog for ten years? There’s no easy answer for that one. The reasons constantly shifted. I started out playing with weblogs because I didn’t want to dissolve into depression remembering my father’s demise two years before on Christmas Day. I also wanted to try the technology, to see whether it would suit my clients. That’s the way it started, but very swiftly the social aspects became addictive. Perhaps too much so. Pursuing popularity can bring out the worst parts of our personalities. I avoided the more ugly permutations of popularity seeking, merely overextending myself. I became a human news aggregator, posting upwards of 50 links a day. The wider acceptance of RSS eventually pulled that rug out from under me (thank GOD), and I switched to one of the PHP/MySQL weblog environments, and it slowed down my posting frequency. Yes, hand-coding for me was faster. Switching to an established weblog CMS allowed me to linger over the links I was choosing, and I expressed more of my personal viewpoints, which a subset of my audience had been clamoring to hear. The breathless pursuit of any and all traffic ended for me at that time, and I found more enjoyment in crafting clever posts or finding articles that deeply interested me. My traffic had been trending slowly down since news aggregators became available, and then Twitter’s debut torched quite a bit of the rest. My weblog style has long been more Twitteresque than traditional weblog style, so I suppose it’s perfectly logical that I’d lose most of my traffic to the little blue bird. Yet I can’t get into Twitter, because 140 characters just isn’t enough for when I need to express something important. If Twitter had shown up just a couple of years earlier, I would have been ecstatic. Now that I write longer posts, I can’t limit my verbosity without terrible time-wasting edits and mangled contractions.
Today, I’m at about 10% from the high traffic marks of 2003. The last year or two have been a struggle to keep the posts flowing regularly, because of my work schedule (thank you, Mr Bush, for our wonderful economic situation - not). Add the time-suck that social media requires, and you get my situation today. Parceling out my time and talents to different services, based on responses … with a bias towards the weblog because I love the form, and always will.
I am concerned about where weblogging is going. Today, the individual who decides to weblog approaches it in a sort of crystalline manner: one must weblog, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google - on and on ad nauseam. Each facet exists unto itself, only mildly sharing content with other facets; more a reflection than a direct copy. And some of us have to split personal from business, something that’s largely been ignored. Personal branding in this environment is schizophrenic at best. We don’t get the same percentage of really high quality posts anymore because of this scattershot philosophy. Interop’s the problem. Information’s getting shoved around, split countless ways, both in front of and behind firewalls, in open-source and proprietary formats. Worse, use of all these services is becoming ‘expected’! A nightmare to manage.
I’d like to point out this ‘new paradigm’ (hah) runs against the philosophy we started out with, the one that got us into weblogging in the first place (at least, it’s the one that caught my imagination) … one master version of information in a single directly-controlled database, many copies pulled from that master. Never having to enter information more than once. Today, we’ve got profiles all over hell and high water, duplicates out the wazoo, personal valuable content behind membership firewalls - often that we can’t easily extract - and it’s called ‘progress.’ We’re supposed to get excited at each new service or app rollout. Just enter your profile (for the umpteenth time) in a rounded-corner gradient Ajax Web 2.0 interface, start entering your valuable information (so the service can monetize your content) and you can taste the future!
This isn’t progress. It’s a fat pig in a fluffy French maid outfit. I’ve got more secret passwords than a politician in a brothel.
I want the social media to pull content from my own single weblog/database, not feed my weblog from their services. I want to control my content directly, archive it myself, choose what services get which information, how and when. And I want it all to be smooth and easy.
So let’s start a company and make it, craft the standard required. Stop the madness before another hundred thousand web apps show up.
A pipe dream, I know, but one my conceit lets me smile over. I remain a Utopian, in spite of my all-too-frequent displays of cynicism and pessimism. I believe the next ten years will make us better. And I’ll be around to record it all … no matter the form.
Comments:
Happy 10 years Garret!
I just looked at my archives and saw that my first blog - hosted by pitas - started on 4/13/2000! I never celebrate the “anniversary” though so I didn’t even realize. Hard to believe a whole decade has gone by. Oy.
Welcome to the 10-year club. I started blogging in 1997, but stopped several years back due to life’s circumstances and a change in career direction. I keep promising myself that I’ll start up again but never seem to get around to it.
I think you’re spot-on about the social media profile centralization issue. Some of these problems are meant to be addressed by services like MetaWeblogAPI and single-sign-on solutions like OpenID, but the slow adoption rate makes them not so great—and the financial weasels that control the large social networking sites are reluctant to integrate them because it means they don’t have 100% control anymore of their profile database.
Cam, you were one of the archetypes I modelled myself after, once I became aware of the scope of weblogging. Your rational takes on major issues helped keep me grounded.
“… and the financial weasels that control the large social networking sites are reluctant to integrate them because it means they don’t have 100% control anymore of their profile database” is exactly, precisely the problem. If anyone is going to monetize my content, it’s going to be *me*. Under my own auspices.
Thanks, Hal!
And Juli, it’s a landmark worth celebrating. Ten years snuck up on me ... I almost missed it last night!
G, you have been a welcome voice of reason and value, and occasionally even fun, for me--thanks!
Congrats, indeed! I passed the same mark at some point this year, though I no longer have the archives to be sure when it was. My posting habits are so bad now, though, that it hardly seems like something to celebrate.
Keep on trucking, Garret - if only to serve as an example for the rest of us. 
I worry over a ‘foolish consistency.’ Yet when I went back over my archives, looking at the major events of the decade and my predictions, it really gave me a charge. I was right more often than I was wrong. Trying to view world events through a common-sense rationalist-humanist filter works.
My ‘actual’ anniversary was around May or June. I’d built a personal weblog on my company website with Userland Frontier, but because it was neither in a mainstream weblog environment (what was?) nor popular, I get heat for claiming more time. So I settle on December 22, 1999. I’ve got better things to do than nitpick.
Besides, weblog-duration gravitas only works for those who already have name recognition. For everyone else, weblogs are all about frequency of postings ... you’re only as good as your latest post!
Bill, you remind me that my readers teach *me* as much as I offer them. You called me out on a bloviation a long time ago, and we took a rancorous disagreement and turned it into a friendship. If that’s not a really positive aspect of weblogging, nothing is.
Congratulations, Garret! Yours has been one of my go-to weblogs for all tens years.
Congrats on your tenth anniversary, Garret! It seems such a long time, and when we all startet I never imagined to be doing it for a whole decade. Do you think that in another 10 years we’ll all still be weblogging?
My congratulations as well, Garret. I’ve been reading your weblog for nearly ten years, and it was both your selection of links and, later, your commentary that kept me coming. A bit of everything that I appreciate, perhaps: the photographer’s eye, the local/state angle on environment, politics and culture, musings on web direction and tools… with general thoughtfulness all throughout. In other words—a common-sense rationalist-humanist filter is exactly what I like!
I look forward to more years of insightful weblogging, at whatever frequency—I’m patient for the good stuff.
Congrats on 10 years of blogging! Hard to remember what it was like pre-blogging… Imagine having to focus only on work ALL DAY. Gods… Still think we need to organize another Behind the Curtain, btw…
Cheers,
Ed
Thank you so much, John!
Andrea, if you’ll be around, I’ll be around! ;^)
Jubal, I’m blushing. Thanks.
Ed, you and Jish. You both want me to crank up Behind the Curtain again. You’ve noticed I still have it online at my photoblog, a tribute to the past?
Now I have to let my heartrate diminish, after my frighteningly icy return from town ...
Happy blogday to yooou,
happy blogday to yooou,
happy blogday, dear Gaaaarret,
happy blogday to yooo-ooou!
And many mooore ...
Oh God, singing?!! I used to cringe at having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me. Okay, a quick snort of scotch, and I can now appreciate it. Thanks, Elise!
You’d need plenty more than just one snort if you actually had to listen to me sing. Be grateful it was merely a virtual song!
I like the self-organizing idea of ‘behind the curtain’… I think we could all use more of that! Very glad to see it archived, although it is too bad that I wasn’t as good about keeping my contribution around for all to see. If I come across it in my own archiving efforts, I’ll republish it and let you know.
Ed
Please do! (For some reason you got caught in my blog spam filtering. Your comment’s been restored.)
Happy anniversary Garret, from a fellow 10 year traveler (and hi everyone!)
Some of these problems are meant to be addressed by services like MetaWeblogAPI and single-sign-on solutions like OpenID, but the slow adoption rate makes them not so great—and the financial weasels that control the large social networking sites are reluctant to integrate them
Well said and a happy 10 to you, sir…