Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again | The Internet Review
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
I keep coming back to this remarkable piece of writing by Cassie. Honest, resonant, and open, centred around a perfect analogy.
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
To put any thoughtful labour into crafting words online today is to watch them get sucked up, repurposed, and often monetized by someone else. It feels a bit like a digital wasteland; overrun with pirates, replete with armies of robots regurgitating everything into a gooey cocktail of digital sludge.
Blogging isn’t one thing and that’s kind of the point. It exists fractured by intention and it can be many things to many people. And now, 20 years after the last blogging revolution, something like a fractured digital presence is once again appealing.
It me:
I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
I enjoyed reading this interview with Jim Nielsen, much as I enjoy reading Jim’s blog. He says:
The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way.
That chimes with what Matthias says in the first issue of his new newsletter:
On your personal site, getting it wrong is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a chance to start small, take first steps, learn, edit, and improve. It’s an invaluable opportunity to evolve and to grow.
The web is what we make it.
Write for yourself.
A collection of hyperlinks to collections of hyperlinks.
How I use my website.