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In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.
I want to go back there.
The Web 1.0 landscape looked a lot different than the Web 2.0 experience we are used to these days, and personal weblogs or “blogs” were a big part of the evolution of Web 2.0.
In those days, it was really simple. You could sign up for a free site on GeoCities, Yahoo, Blogger, Diaryland, or any of a number of free hosting sites that allowed you to set up your blog, get going with a WYSIWYG editor, and send your thoughts out into the world.
For those who were a little more adventurous, you could purchase an actual domain name, pay for website hosting, and go for it that way.
Whichever model a person chose, they were typing their long and short-form thoughts into a screen and sending them out into the world to be consumed by the masses — whomever those masses were.
Social media wasn’t a thing that existed back then, so all our pontificating on various topics took place on our personal weblogs, and the discussions happened in the comments section of said blogs. It was a golden time.
People were way more connected to each other
People were way more connected to each other. There wasn’t a whole lot of anonymity because anyone could look up your WHOIS information and see who a blog actually belonged to. Trolls were simply banned from your comment section, never to be heard from again.
When Twitter came along, it started as a “microblogging” platform where people would go to put out short, frequent missives as opposed to the longer, personal pieces we put on our blogs. It, too, evolved, as these things do, and now it is the hellscape we at once loathe but can’t leave alone.
Watching the demise of Twitter under the helm of Elon Musk has made me nostalgic for the personal…
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