Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwhiles | Hacker News Reader

Was blogging every really mainstream?

In Internet? Totally. Blogging intended as "reading blog", from 2008 to 2015 (roughly, I don't have hard numbers) was pretty mainstream in the Internet population of that time. Maybe now it's not mainstream anymore just because the Internet population increased (again) a lot, and the newjoiners are not into reading blogs but rather watching photos or (short) videos.

In that case, I wonder if blogging stayed the same - and it just feels less important because there is so much more internet now. The pond grew and it stayed the same.

A lot of it has changed. A lot has moved to other social media. Companies have pretty much moved away from hosting, much less encouraging, a lot of personal blogs on their sites. A food blog, say, is much more likely to be a professional full-time operation as opposed to a hobby. And so forth. There are still classic personal blogs out there. But they're less common.

I still write a lot but mostly have other outlets than my personal blog.

Eh, a number of prolific bloggers ended up moving to walled gardens like facebook for audiences.

The Oatmeal summed what occurred pretty well

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

I would say even earlier than 2008, at least if my memory is not betraying me.

I guess it depends of your definition of blog, but I remember Fotolog being incredibly popular circa 2006 even when compared to mainstream social networks. While Wikipedia says it's a social network, I recall it was used mostly for blogging (not so much for social interaction).

And IIRC, when Google acquired Blogger (2003) blogging was not exactly a obscure thing, although I don't think I knew anyone with a personal blog back then.

Yeah it was earlier than 2008. Corporate blogging, at least in many tech circles, was pretty big and companies were coming out with social media guidelines by the mid-2000s. Journalists and analysts often had personal brand blogs on their company sites. And, yes, there were personal blogs on sites like Blogger (or self-hosted). I'd actually say the 2003 date was fairly early on for truly mainstream blogging; I started in 2003 and I won't say I was on the leading edge but I was probably an early adopter.

Height of blogging, or at least when it was new and becoming "mainstream" (if in fact it did) before Twitter microblogging and a recognized publication genre was around 2003 or 2005 at the latest I think. You can tell by RSS becoming standardized 1998-2001 and getting direct support in browsers for a while (Safari could subscribe to RDF feeds in HTML meta links in Mac OS (X) 10.4 if not earlier; FF probably earlier with plugins).

You are probably right, as you grow older you tend to lose the feeling of time... or at least, I do :) 2007-2008 was when FB really started to be mainstream so blogging was "hype" way before that.

I think the process was: 1. blogging 2. paid blogging services 3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later myspace) 4. wordpress as a next generation blogging service (invented by ex-livejournal employees) both free and paid 5. walled garden blogging platforms (Facebook had a "notes" feature for long format blogging) 6. product and data analyst managers realizing long format blogging wasn't accessible to mainstream and moving towards 2-3 sentence "posts" and later "microblogging" with twitter, vines, periscope etc

Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers" are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits per month.

When the internet was but a trickle, blogging was maintrickle

Reply on news.ycombinator.com