Blogs Never Died
I’m still waiting to see if I get accepted into the ranks of participants, but January is Bring Back Blogging month as self-declared by Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam. Blogs, of course, didn’t go anywhere but the argument isn’t really that they did. Rather, it’s that readers did, and some bloggers did, with the advent of microblogging via social media.
Extractive capital at work again, pulling us apart while making it look like it was bringing us together.
For my part, while technically I’ve blogged since 1999 or so it wasn’t at all consistently and the vast majority of it no longer exists online outside of smatterings available via the Wayback Machine. My intent for this year is to restore as much of it as I can find—from across many different domains, services, and sites—to live in perpetuity here on Bix Dot Blog.
As near as I can tell right now, that amounts to thousands of posts, because prior to social media we microblogged on our own blogs, and even in the age of social media I spent maybe a year once again doing a lot of my microblogging the old-fashioned way.
Participants in Bring Back Blogging are expected to post at least three times over the course of this month. (They also have to mention the project at its start and its end.) Obviously, that’s not in any way a hurdle for me here, even without a microblogging component.
In the meantime, you can browse the participants list, and come the end of the month they’ll be bundling a sort of omnibus RSS feed, although I can’t imagine why you’d want an omnibus RSS feed like that. It seems somewhat to recreate the problematic context collapse of social media feeds.
Part of the delight and power of RSS is that you can browse or read your feeds in any way you choose, be it all mixed together or feed by feed, source by source, person by person, and can change it up from one day to the next. You can find my feed at the top of the blog: that little icon, in fact, means “RSS feed here”.
I’m not sure how many of Bring Back Blogging’s participants are new to blogging, or how many old salts. For me, it’s somewhere in between, and with the restoration project underway I’m literally going to be bringing as much of it back as I can.