I missed the old school blogging era
The Project Day 26
I was meant to be of another time
I have often said I think I was meant to be born in a different era. I have romanticized living in other centuries and periods. I can see myself in movies and books where the story is taking place centuries ago. It don’t feel deterred by how harder the times may have been. It may be arrogant but I imagine myself as able to survive it. In all the thinking about being meant for another time, I don’t think I have ever wished to be of a relatively recent past. Enter: becomes aware that blogging used to be a thing and thinks she missed the height of it. An exception may have emerged.
Maybe I would have been a great blogger. I ponder this after years of feeling I just don’t quite fit in anywhere on the social medias.
Too wordy for Instagram. “Write continues in comment” being my lame work around.
Not too wordy for Facebook (thank you FB) but the vibe there is too many “hey sexy”s and let me sell you this thing.
And any of the video spaces, TikTok and Youtube being the mains, I feel: I write! I want to write. I am a writer. I write. Writing doesn’t readily translate to video for me. It’s not that I hate video, or even dislike it. I have gotten into it at times even, but my thing definitely doesn’t seem to be video. I don’t think…
So this year as I embarked on my next deep dive of where to put my energy, and I see myself as not fitting into the spaces I have largely taken on so far, blogging came up. Apparently it was a thing and I missed it. Before it became vlogging and before it was out popularized by 280 character snippets, insta grams and later grams, Facebook friends and groups, reels and shorts and all the rest. Maybe I missed the part where I would have fit in!
I state this lightly as I do generally subscribe to “it’s never too late” for most things and I don’t think blogging is entirely dead. In my poking around about “personal blog” things, I’ve found a number of articles (blogs?) to that exact topic. Blogging isn’t dead!, they say. All that and I suspect there was a cool thing going on and it was outside of my time. I wasn’t the right person in that era. Meaning I hadn’t become a person who would like blogging when blogging was in.
I’m not even yet fully clear on what I might have missed or when it was going on, or even what it is now!
What is blogging? What was blogging? I have questions.
I’ll start with one.
Q: When was blogging popular?
A: The early 2000s. Blogger was a main platform.
That would have been when I was graduating high school and starting college.
I recall being vaguely aware there was a “blog thing” happening but I never got into it. I never followed a blog, I was never a fan of a blogger. The most I may have thought about it was that I didn’t get why people would be interested in what I understood blogs to be. Who had time to read about other people’s lives when you should be living your own, may have been a thought. I don’t specifically recall having that thought but I can see my 20 year old self having that thought.
I have only just started poking around about “personal blog” things. Apparently there was a whole time when blogs were the in thing and the writing was not like what it is now. What differentiates what it was like then to what it was like now?
I think I’d like to make a list for this to compare and contrast. I’ll link it in when I do it. * or I’ll add it in here!
So far I have:
Then: diary like, non commercial, personal, casual writing, “writing about their day or whatever was going on in their mind and heart”
Now: “heavily monetized”, focused on attracting visitors
I don’t see them as inherently opposed, which is the tone of everything I’ve so far read that compares them. I think doing both is possible.
I also don’t like referring to it as “personal blog” but so far using the term I see commonly used for it. I don’t like to call it “personal blog” for myself because I don’t feel personal about it. I’m sure it has to do with that whole I don’t have separate parts of life. It’s not a work life and a personal life, its one big life.
Length: friend or foe, good or bad?
And while in the era of (personal) blogging interest, and length seeming to be a factor of mine to contend with, I have already felt: maybe I’m too long for here too!
When the WUIL piece was coming together and I was starting to feel close to a “finished for now” place, I noted the number of pages. When I first started, I expected there to be “a lot” of pages due to the process. Bring it all in to boil it down being the process, means you’re going to start with a lot that will probably not stay. It seemed to me that it would naturally get smaller and reduced through the process. I thought that process would mostly be a reduction process, and now I see that may have been a naive presumption. I think this will also very much be an additive process.
The starting doc for WUIL was 30 pages and 11,706 words.
The current version approaching ‘finished for now’ is 29 pages and 12,959.
What’s going on here?
Writing about my life, working on The Project. If you’re new here, The Project, in short is this big idea I have about organizing and editing all my writing from the past 10 years. These Substack posts are like journal entries writing about and documenting that. Allowing myself to write and aspire to post what comes, down on this page. It’s about doing the thing. A journal ABOUT the work, not THE work (yet or ever, not sure).