There were lots of blogs that were personal diaries back in the early days; but there were always many blogs the weren't. The first "web log", in my opinion, was the page at NCSA, home of the Mosaic browser, that was literally a log of new web servers coming on-line. I used to go there daily to see what was new. (Later I used Yahoo for that purpose; and not much later than that I gave up. :-)
Another big site for early blogging was Dave Winer's "Scripting News", in which he talked about Frontier and Radio Userland, two early web platforms. Winer was also responsible for "EditThisPage", the first web site I ever saw that allowed editing a website on another server through the browser. It was followed by Weblogs.com, which hosted some of the earliest blogs. I had one there, briefly.
And then, of course, there was GeoCities, where you explicitly picked your "city" based on the kinds of things you were going to be writing about. Blogging was always extremely hetergeneous.
What we didn't have in the early days was monetization or, naturally, an intense focus on monetization.
In the late 90s and early 00s, blogs were originally "weblogs" or "web logs", just a sort of online diary. It was mainly something you wrote, rather than something for others to read.
Over time, the most interesting blogs became the most popular, and these were generally blogs on a fixed topic. The meaning of "blog" shifted to refer to these high-quality regularly-updated article sites, more like a magazine. It became highly commercialized as people tried to turn blogs into careers or side hustles. The original use of blogging, as a personal journal that only your friends care to read, was supplanted by social media.
Nowadays, pro-blogging has been supplanted by YouTube, since the ad revenue on video is much higher and the audience and discoverability much better. Not every blogger was able to make this transition, however, because the skillsets of a magazine writer and a television host are different.
1997-1998ish I helped run a site with a bunch of forums. Regular members could request their own Diary forum, which worked exactly the way blogs would work later on. Some were literal diaries, others became grand works of fiction, some were collaborative storytelling, some favoured pictures etc.
It saddens me that many people feel the need to seemingly monetize their creative outlet.
This is true and I really enjoy reading those. Sometimes I come across someone's website where they've just done that and it gives me so much joy to read these things.
Someone writing about graduating, marrying, dealing with the death of their wife. Artistically stunning in its mundaneness.
Perhaps it's not for everyone. My own blog is very like that. The thoughts are mostly at whatever bakedness they are and if someone likes it, that's great. If no one does, c'est la vie. Perhaps one day my daughter will read it to see what her father was like when she was young.
Who knows. But the little cairns we make in the wood tell little stories.
> The only people reading your online journal were your other friends IRL 89% of the time.
Was it just me who had like 1 irl friend occasionally open their website and the rest was an online group of friends comprised of people you met on forums and game servers?
I’m old enough to remember when blogs were basically personal journals. Totally agree things have changed. But those diary-style posts are still out there, they mostly circulate in small circles instead of being easy to stumble across.
The upside is self-expression didn’t die, it just evolved into new forms such as vlogs, newsletters, short clips, etc...
My own blog probably fits the “new” style, but for me it’s more about practicing storytelling and sharing something that resonates.
So true. Before the Internet swallowed the world and became a part of everyone’s life, it was possible to be much more open and less superficial. I still see this to some extent with personal sites on the Gemini:// protocol, but maybe it won’t last forever.
> We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal.
I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt similarly offended when I was "tagged" in photographs (and still am to this day).
This idea that we were all collectively oblivious and only recently made our way out of the fog really bothers me. Why did the majority of my generation never care about their own privacy?
20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time.
And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.
And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.
yeah by 2000ish I really didn't see egregious opsec violations at all as a rule. the world described by the linked article doesn't really match my experiences.
if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.
also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only
that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one
It’s true. I remember the glory days of the “Blogosphere”: the Truth-Laid Bear’s blog ecosystem (I was a finny fish at one point, IIRC), USS Clueless, 2Blowhards, servers going down under the weight of an Instalanche, and many many others. Some are still around; I see posts from Iowahawk once in a while. But it wasn’t all personal diaries. There were pundits, essayists about every topic, diarists; me, I reviewed books. It was a heady time, and great fun.
I don't write online anymore. All my journal entries sit in a notes app (I use Obsidian) because I realised that the goal is for me to write for my own memory and reflection. Writing online is doing free labout for AI models. No thank you!
I don't remember when I first heard the term "blog", but it must have been around 2001 or so because I had a page on my personal site that was blog.cfm (I think people were still often using the longer form "weblog" to refer to them). It was a series of entries, with a date, and was mostly tech musings with some personal updates mixed in.
You can still discover communities doing old-school blogging and personal site through webrings. They are still there as a niche, just not discoverable by search engines like they used to be.
For me it feels too... commercial? The design is too standardized and everytime you scroll there is this big overlay that nags you to subscribe which annoys me so much that I don't read (most) Substack posts anymore.
We've collectively learned that besides the OPSEC concerns most of the "diary" type posting is very boring to consume (most people are boring) and therefore it's pretty likely your posts aren't that great either.
To make them interesting you must put effort, which we see some people doing, but anyone who has done it knows how the amount of effort needed detracts from the actual meaningful part of experiences/life/relationships.
In a way blogs are the worst medium now for this: Hard for people to consume casually, hard to meaningfully control the audience, and constantly scraped/archived by 3rd-parties. Most who still want to do this more causal, diary-type posting are better served by a private Instagram and posting occasionally, but mostly focusing on low-effort Stories. The key part/fix is the ephemeral nature of the majority of posts/content.
And there you see exactly how/why most people end up doing exactly that.
most of the "diary" type posting is very boring to consume
(most people are boring)
The "peak Livejournal era" (2001-2010?) was so much fun to me. I had a lot of friends with LJs. These were people I knew so their "boring" stuff was enjoyable to read. I had maybe a dozen or two friends who mutually followed me, plus there were some public figures with LJs I followed as well.
I really enjoyed the coziness and uncommercial-ness of it. People wrote so much more openly and thoughtfully.
I understand the OPSEC issues mentioned by the linked article, but the faux example he posted is kind of an unrealistic caricature. I don't remember people typically doing that kind of OPSEC-nightmare "live blogging" type stuff on noncommercial personal blogs.
Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than following the life of my family, friends, and relatives.
Almost every person is interesting to several dozen other people. Exceptions happen, but are relatively rare.
You're correct on the other count: writing takes effort. Not writing to make things interesting, just... writing in general. If you want to summarize your day, it's gonna cost you 30 minutes of brain work. If you want to post to your Instagram reel, Snapchat, or whatever, just point your phone at your surroundings and hold the record button down for 10 seconds or so.
> Ten years ago if you were blogging on Tumblr or Wordpress you were writing to an audience in an attempt to promote something.
Really? That wasn't my experience at all. Neither in the blogs I read, nor the blogs I wr[oi]te. Most blogs have always seemed like a work of passion to me, especially the ones hostes on platforms like WP.
Well, yeah. But some of us were there before the beginning. Wordpress? Huh? You wrote your own code or you just wrote raw HTML.
1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.
My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.
Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.
I was the first person I knew to learn HTML; that was in the mid-90’s. I had a personal website from December of 1996, where I posted mostly book reviews; later it evolved into a hand-coded blog, followed by MovableType, followed by WordPress, which I still use.
> blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's
OPSEC has nothing to do with it. People used pseudonyms by default in the 1990s, and blocked Doubleclick (a.k.a. Google) in their ~/.hosts files. Blogs were non-commercial places where we worked out ideas and offered useful information.
A quarter century old Usenet posts are pretty much the only non-work related place where my name exists on the Internet. There are a few stragglers, but not many any more.
I find myself wanting blogging to be more popular but struggling to justify why it should be. For my own personal site I want to share stuff about myself but also dont because of privacy. I've settled on technical-ish writeups about stuff im working on but thats hard as fuck to produce.
Early generations of 'social media', or in the context of this post I guess 'microblogging' were super personal, basic, and of the moment (without followup for 24hrs when another post happened). I'm talking like early Twitter posts would be what people were having for lunch. Or that they just woke up and were enjoying a coffee. And the classic "poopin'". It was like that for at least a few years before the posts got longer and more directed to conversational context or 'trying to say something more'.
There were lots of blogs that were personal diaries back in the early days; but there were always many blogs the weren't. The first "web log", in my opinion, was the page at NCSA, home of the Mosaic browser, that was literally a log of new web servers coming on-line. I used to go there daily to see what was new. (Later I used Yahoo for that purpose; and not much later than that I gave up. :-)
Another big site for early blogging was Dave Winer's "Scripting News", in which he talked about Frontier and Radio Userland, two early web platforms. Winer was also responsible for "EditThisPage", the first web site I ever saw that allowed editing a website on another server through the browser. It was followed by Weblogs.com, which hosted some of the earliest blogs. I had one there, briefly.
And then, of course, there was GeoCities, where you explicitly picked your "city" based on the kinds of things you were going to be writing about. Blogging was always extremely hetergeneous.
What we didn't have in the early days was monetization or, naturally, an intense focus on monetization.
In the late 90s and early 00s, blogs were originally "weblogs" or "web logs", just a sort of online diary. It was mainly something you wrote, rather than something for others to read.
Over time, the most interesting blogs became the most popular, and these were generally blogs on a fixed topic. The meaning of "blog" shifted to refer to these high-quality regularly-updated article sites, more like a magazine. It became highly commercialized as people tried to turn blogs into careers or side hustles. The original use of blogging, as a personal journal that only your friends care to read, was supplanted by social media.
Nowadays, pro-blogging has been supplanted by YouTube, since the ad revenue on video is much higher and the audience and discoverability much better. Not every blogger was able to make this transition, however, because the skillsets of a magazine writer and a television host are different.
1997-1998ish I helped run a site with a bunch of forums. Regular members could request their own Diary forum, which worked exactly the way blogs would work later on. Some were literal diaries, others became grand works of fiction, some were collaborative storytelling, some favoured pictures etc.
It saddens me that many people feel the need to seemingly monetize their creative outlet.
And back in the day sites like kuro5hin and even slashdot, allowed their users to have a public diary, or scratchpad.
Then there were sites like Advogato which were built around diaries as well as reputations.
This is true and I really enjoy reading those. Sometimes I come across someone's website where they've just done that and it gives me so much joy to read these things.
Someone writing about graduating, marrying, dealing with the death of their wife. Artistically stunning in its mundaneness.
Perhaps it's not for everyone. My own blog is very like that. The thoughts are mostly at whatever bakedness they are and if someone likes it, that's great. If no one does, c'est la vie. Perhaps one day my daughter will read it to see what her father was like when she was young.
Who knows. But the little cairns we make in the wood tell little stories.
> The only people reading your online journal were your other friends IRL 89% of the time.
Was it just me who had like 1 irl friend occasionally open their website and the rest was an online group of friends comprised of people you met on forums and game servers?
I’m old enough to remember when blogs were basically personal journals. Totally agree things have changed. But those diary-style posts are still out there, they mostly circulate in small circles instead of being easy to stumble across.
The upside is self-expression didn’t die, it just evolved into new forms such as vlogs, newsletters, short clips, etc...
My own blog probably fits the “new” style, but for me it’s more about practicing storytelling and sharing something that resonates.
Thanks for sharing.
Mine is mainly a diary style blog too.
So true. Before the Internet swallowed the world and became a part of everyone’s life, it was possible to be much more open and less superficial. I still see this to some extent with personal sites on the Gemini:// protocol, but maybe it won’t last forever.
> We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal.
I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt similarly offended when I was "tagged" in photographs (and still am to this day).
This idea that we were all collectively oblivious and only recently made our way out of the fog really bothers me. Why did the majority of my generation never care about their own privacy?
20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time.
And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.
And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.
yeah by 2000ish I really didn't see egregious opsec violations at all as a rule. the world described by the linked article doesn't really match my experiences.
if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.
also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only
that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one
I think it is more a matter of someone confusing own bubbule with how everyone acts.
Overwhelming majority of people did not had journal and it was not any more normal to wrote every day then it is now.
It is true that people were not able predict true extend of online harassment. But again, plenty people now are completely oblivious to what mobs do.
It’s true. I remember the glory days of the “Blogosphere”: the Truth-Laid Bear’s blog ecosystem (I was a finny fish at one point, IIRC), USS Clueless, 2Blowhards, servers going down under the weight of an Instalanche, and many many others. Some are still around; I see posts from Iowahawk once in a while. But it wasn’t all personal diaries. There were pundits, essayists about every topic, diarists; me, I reviewed books. It was a heady time, and great fun.
E/N am I right?
My blog made me online friends that I still have today. We all had one and learned programming together.
I don't write online anymore. All my journal entries sit in a notes app (I use Obsidian) because I realised that the goal is for me to write for my own memory and reflection. Writing online is doing free labout for AI models. No thank you!
I don't remember when I first heard the term "blog", but it must have been around 2001 or so because I had a page on my personal site that was blog.cfm (I think people were still often using the longer form "weblog" to refer to them). It was a series of entries, with a date, and was mostly tech musings with some personal updates mixed in.
https://web.archive.org/web/20011129084149/http://mr-bill.ne...
(I hereby disavow any of the weird takes I may have had in my early 20s lol)
I love that your last post (as of that archive date at least) linked to Telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
See
The first "blog"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorn_Barger
https://firstsiteguide.com/robot-wisdom-and-jorn-barger/
https://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/
https://www.wired.com/2005/07/robot-wisdom-on-the-street/
You can still discover communities doing old-school blogging and personal site through webrings. They are still there as a niche, just not discoverable by search engines like they used to be.
Livejournal and then xanga… Bled into MySpace which led to Facebook which was the beginning of the end.
Don’t forget blogspot -> Medium -> Substack… which has led to enshitfication of thought
i dont get the substack hate
For me it feels too... commercial? The design is too standardized and everytime you scroll there is this big overlay that nags you to subscribe which annoys me so much that I don't read (most) Substack posts anymore.
We've collectively learned that besides the OPSEC concerns most of the "diary" type posting is very boring to consume (most people are boring) and therefore it's pretty likely your posts aren't that great either.
To make them interesting you must put effort, which we see some people doing, but anyone who has done it knows how the amount of effort needed detracts from the actual meaningful part of experiences/life/relationships.
In a way blogs are the worst medium now for this: Hard for people to consume casually, hard to meaningfully control the audience, and constantly scraped/archived by 3rd-parties. Most who still want to do this more causal, diary-type posting are better served by a private Instagram and posting occasionally, but mostly focusing on low-effort Stories. The key part/fix is the ephemeral nature of the majority of posts/content.
And there you see exactly how/why most people end up doing exactly that.
I really enjoyed the coziness and uncommercial-ness of it. People wrote so much more openly and thoughtfully.
I understand the OPSEC issues mentioned by the linked article, but the faux example he posted is kind of an unrealistic caricature. I don't remember people typically doing that kind of OPSEC-nightmare "live blogging" type stuff on noncommercial personal blogs.
> most people are boring
Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than following the life of my family, friends, and relatives.
Almost every person is interesting to several dozen other people. Exceptions happen, but are relatively rare.
You're correct on the other count: writing takes effort. Not writing to make things interesting, just... writing in general. If you want to summarize your day, it's gonna cost you 30 minutes of brain work. If you want to post to your Instagram reel, Snapchat, or whatever, just point your phone at your surroundings and hold the record button down for 10 seconds or so.
For some reason that bottom menu is really bothersome to my enjoyment of the site
People want to be read and the algorithm is selected over time to promote this.
The only problem is that nobody selects the algorithms but the platforms.
Maybe in the ends, algorithms will still be selected for virality regardless no matter who choose, but I doubt it.
> Ten years ago if you were blogging on Tumblr or Wordpress you were writing to an audience in an attempt to promote something.
Really? That wasn't my experience at all. Neither in the blogs I read, nor the blogs I wr[oi]te. Most blogs have always seemed like a work of passion to me, especially the ones hostes on platforms like WP.
Well, yeah. But some of us were there before the beginning. Wordpress? Huh? You wrote your own code or you just wrote raw HTML.
1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.
My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.
Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.
I was the first person I knew to learn HTML; that was in the mid-90’s. I had a personal website from December of 1996, where I posted mostly book reviews; later it evolved into a hand-coded blog, followed by MovableType, followed by WordPress, which I still use.
> blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's
OPSEC has nothing to do with it. People used pseudonyms by default in the 1990s, and blocked Doubleclick (a.k.a. Google) in their ~/.hosts files. Blogs were non-commercial places where we worked out ideas and offered useful information.
Lots of people used real names on Usenet at least into the 1990s. It probably changed with eternal September.
A quarter century old Usenet posts are pretty much the only non-work related place where my name exists on the Internet. There are a few stragglers, but not many any more.
I find myself wanting blogging to be more popular but struggling to justify why it should be. For my own personal site I want to share stuff about myself but also dont because of privacy. I've settled on technical-ish writeups about stuff im working on but thats hard as fuck to produce.
Early generations of 'social media', or in the context of this post I guess 'microblogging' were super personal, basic, and of the moment (without followup for 24hrs when another post happened). I'm talking like early Twitter posts would be what people were having for lunch. Or that they just woke up and were enjoying a coffee. And the classic "poopin'". It was like that for at least a few years before the posts got longer and more directed to conversational context or 'trying to say something more'.