Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Written Inc. turns 20

The story of a lifetime
London, ON
June 2024
This photo originally shared on Instagram


Does anyone still blog? For what it’s worth, I do. In fact, today marks 20 years since I launched my blog, Written Inc.

It’s difficult to remember what the digital world was like before blogs came along. We were just a few years into the commercial internet, and while the web was well on its way toward maturing into a broadly used, everyday platform, it was still largely a read-only affair for most of us not blessed with the developer gene.

Blogging changed the narrative, as it put easy-to-use publishing tools into the hands of millions of people. You didn’t need to know code or be a nerd. If you could write, or take pictures, or create any form of content, blogging was your jam.

Blogging’s shift into the mainstream just predated a little thing we now call social media, and many of the community connections that took root in the blogosphere set the tone for the larger-scale conversations that eventually transitioned over to Facebook and others.

Of course, once social media went mainstream, blogging felt increasingly quaint. Eventually the comment numbers trailed off as we shifted our time into socialmedialand.

But here’s the thing: we still want and need to connect. And while social media apps are far more efficient at networking, they come with their own algorithmic baggage - as well as increasingly Draconian rules about what can and cannot be posted or shared.

Which is why I still regularly post to my blog. Sure, it’s largely a mirror of my regular social media posts. But as a platform of record, a journey of my digital life, a searchable story that I’ll often dig back into when I need a warm fuzzy, nothing tops it.

While the blogging era might have been brief, it set the stage for so much of what we consider routine today. In so many ways, its simplicity explains why we gaze into the rearview so fondly.

What’s your blog story? What did this medium mean to you? What does it still mean to you?

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Related:
https://writteninc.blogspot.com

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