With the help of my good friend Serendipity, I was reading some backlog on Dave Winer’s scripting.com when I stumbled upon this article from the Guardian:
In the two decades since Dave Winer more or less invented the genre, blogging has been through the usual internet hype cycle: lauded breathlessly as the new, new thing; rapidly taken up until it reaches a peak after which boredom sets in and the quest for the next new thing begins. At the moment the crazes are microblogging – twittering – and ephemeral communications such as Snapchat, but these too will pass.
And when they do, people will suddenly rediscover that some of the most interesting writing, thinking and discussion in the world still goes on in the wilds of the blogosphere, far away from the big-name media brands and online publications.
Emphasis mine.
(Aside: I still tell people I’ve got a website more than I say a blog – because blog is a contraction from weblog and blog is kind of linked to blogger dot com, which in itself is a household name of Google, and I’m not sure I want to give this company more than it currently has (read: too much, way too much web traffic). But OK, let’s use each other indifferently as we’re referring to Dave Winer and the pre-Google definition of “blog”. Silly old nitpicking me. End aside.)
Long-form writing, even if it’s only the length of one physical page (heck, even half of that), is indeed more helpful. I know it’s obvious, but you can provide better insight and take the time to explain and rationalise on a blog entry. And since most of what’s produced on this “web of articles” is not subject to stakes of visibility, findability, marketability, it’s possible that you’ll find content that is aimed at providing proper content (heh), not content to drive you to click through to our beloved advertisers.
I’m almost completely off social networks (Twitter is a mess, Facebook is a marketer’s wet dream and I want no part of that). I’m on Mastodon, but it feels more like an IRC channel on steroids than a so-called social network. This website has been online for twenty years. Longer than any social network. And there’s a lot of such long-lived personal websites.
Long live blogging. And long live the indie web.