Yesterday I had a brief conversation with a man who mentioned he’d started blogging in 2005, when almost no one was doing it because blogging platforms were such a new thing.
It got me thinking about those early days, so I went back and had a look at what I was writing and photographing on Blogster in 2005, about a year before I created GenevaLunch.com. It became the Lake Geneva region’s main source of news in English, and included a wine and food category where I wrote about Swiss wine. The entire site, or “online community newspaper”, was a blog in the sense that it used blog technology that was a shade more sophisticated than my first one, on Blogspot.
I also looked at a few other people’s blog posts from those early days. They’re all tough to read, including mine. Viva the change!
Here’s what I see on those old web pages – long, rambling texts, random stuff, photos used mainly to illustrate texts, lots of borrowed or just plain stolen material, no videos. They linked to other sites, but social media and the idea of conversations hadn’t arrived.
If people wanted to know how to find a wine blog – and there were already thousands of them by 2005 – they turned to print to find out who was writing something decent online. Googling wasn’t yet a generic household word. By 2010, one wannabe wine writer, looking for a name for his blog, googled “wine blog” and found 40 million. Ouch! even allowing for duplicates.Here’s one top 100 wine blogs list, based on his findings. There were thousands of such lists being made, awards being handed out – a sea of blather because one of the glories of the Internet is that anyone can pretend to be anything, at least in the short run.
My bet is that in another 9 years we’ll be wondering why anyone worked this way. And we’ll be shaking our heads over social media as well. We’ll be very bored by then with the idea that the medium is the message and the conversation is the content.
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