I had a problem, this last Blaugust. There were so many blogs to read, but I’d have to hunt down a spreadsheet, or hope I saw them as they scrolled by on Mastodon or BlueSky, or scroll through the Blaugust Discord. When I did find them, I’d see that I’d missed double the number of posts as I’d read.
Everything scrolls away so quickly on social media. If you’re glued to the stream, if your phone is always in your hand, then maybe you’ll be able to keep up. Look away for a few hours and you’ll never catch up again. There’s no permanence. There’s no time to look around.
Blogs
The word “blog” is (or was) shorthand for “weblog”. Early web pioneers would manually update web pages with links to interesting stuff they found on the Internet – this was before search engines made it simple. Yahoo! was, back then, THE place to go if you wanted to find things on the web, and it was nothing more than links to websites sorted by category.
If your website wasn’t on Yahoo!, it was almost certain nobody was going to stumble upon your site. The boundless creativity of the terminally online came up with a bunch of solutions. Link aggregators like Digg, Fark, Slashdot; web rings; weblogs.
Someone would find something fun on the Internet, so they’d fire up Front Page or some text editor, craft some HTML, maybe add some thoughts about it or life in general, then use FTP to upload it to some web host where someone might find it, follow the link, and find something new.
I was around back then, somewhere between the discovery of fire and the follow-up of the wheel, when we had to blog by moving the bits around ourselves in little sledges (wheelbarrows having not yet been invented).
Penultimatum was my first or second blog (darfstellar being the other one, not sure in which order I made them). I believe I did most of the art myself; I think I stole the frog cartoon from somewhere. I know it was my one mission in my online life to get my blog indexed by Yahoo!. I’m not sure what I expected to happen if it did. Fame and fortune, probably. I had my head in the clouds a lot back then. But this was what you did, if you were web-capable back in the dawn of the public Internet – you made your own web page, you made your own blog, and then you tried to get people to read it. Since I was, at the time, minorly internet-known for the stuff I worked on at Apple and Sony, some people did, and I was happy.
The internet exploded in popularity, and people went everywhere. Forums built online communities around pretty much everything. Websites built their own communities. Blogs fell out of fashion; why read the thoughts of one person when you could join a community of hundreds? A list of curated links fell out of fashion.
So back to the topic of what I’ve done. With a little more history. I started my first Daily Blogroll on my blog West Karana back in November of 2007. Instead of writing a bunch of little blog posts about the discussions going on in the blog-o-sphere, I thought I could just put them all together in a single post and just say a sentence or two about all of them.
2007 had been a bad year for me. I’d lost my job in San Diego, was out of work for a couple of months, found a new job in Connecticut (a job I still have), moved cross country, my dad died, it was just a really bad year. I turned to the gaming community, and they responded when I needed them. Writing about what other people were writing about; being part of the conversation, part of that world, kept me going when I really had nobody else but my cat. (RIP Lannister).
I did the Daily Blogroll, on and off (never really was daily) for two years before it became overwhelming. What used to take a few minutes before work turned into something that would take hours, and so I slowed down and then stopped.
Problem was, I never really had the time to look at so many blogs each day. I tried Feedly, but then I’d get overwhelmed by the vast number of articles I’d have to catch up on each day. Too much stress, so, in the end, I’d just follow people on Twitter, or Google Plus, or Facebook up until the time they went Nazi, died, or stopped showing me content I cared about, respectively. It took until G+ died for me to come back to blogging (having by this time lost the westkarana.com domain), and for Blaugust to get me to do it with any sort of regularity.
Keeping up with other people’s blogs became a problem once again.
So I have done something about it.
That’ll be another post, but for now, at the top left of this very blog is a link for “Daily Blogroll”. I’d love it if you’d give it a click and then let me know if you liked what you found there.