Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway

Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.

Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?

Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.

The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.

We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher.

I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.

One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.

The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.

I had Gemini copy a bunch of text from a personal blog yesterday to answer a query so the content will definitely get read

Here's a starting point https://peopleandblogs.com/

We'll have to get the old (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in fashion.

SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table. Everything else was views on that.

Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.

I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around

There's some here https://indieweb.org/webring

Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.

> an approximation to the information

Playing telephone has now been automated ...

Also 100% guarantee of a pop up asking to subscribe the moment you scroll.