4 ms·
Blogs never went away. It's just that all the vast majority of the new web users, a number that completely overwhelmed the existing population, went straight in
by superkuh 4y ago
Blogs never went away. It's just that all the vast majority of the new web users, a number that completely overwhelmed the existing population, went straight into the walled gardens of megacorps. They still haven't become aware of the web at large (partly because web search sucks now). But their perceptions don't effect that the fact blog users and readers still exist.
I think the real title of this article should be, "Introduce Personal Blogging to Smartphone Users".
- jseliger 4y agoRight: https://jakeseliger.com/ https://jakeseliger.com/ Anyone who wants to do personal blogging, can. There are few things with lower barriers to entry.
- Scoundreller 4y agoDoesn’t help that Google often de-ranks non-corporate content. They used to ensure a mix of results: some blogs, some forum posts, some reviews, some videos. Now it’s just the bigger players. If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties. Even Wikipedia is toward the bottom of the page…
- superkuh 4y agoYep. My biggest peeve is that google never returns more than 400 search results now. Either you find it on the first 3-4 pages of 100 results or it stops and gives you no more. You can go 36 pages at 10 results per page but it's still only ever <400 results. It makes serendipitous web search and surfing nearly impossible and like you said, the first pages of results are stuffed with corporate sites and things that changed in the last week. Bing, btw, will only ever return <900 results.
- 082349872349872 4y agoare you aware of https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu ?
- jefftk 4y ago> If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties. My expectation is that most people searching for the name of the bank are doing it because they are trying to find the official bank pages. If searches like [bankname fraud] etc also mostly got the bank's own pages, that would be a problem, but this sounds like giving people what they're looking for?
- wolpoli 4y agoI just did a Google search on a [big canadian bank with 4-letters fraud] and got all the bank's own pages. The bank created specialized pages for different fraud related scenarios, and they monopolized the first result page.
- jefftk 4y agoHmm, I forgot that "fraud" in this context will often be things like identity theft, and the bank's own materials might be relevant. But yeah, trying that search I agree there's too much of the bank's own results in the response. [big canadian bank with 4-letters criticism] is better, though
- ljm 4y agoI like what the indieweb community are trying to do to promote this, at least in principle. It couldn’t be easier to host a blog, whether static or through something like Wordpress or Ghost. But integration with native editors is pretty poor and writing a lengthy post into a blog’s hosted editor isn’t that nice if you already have a nice writing setup on, say, your iPad. So, things like Micropub and IndieAuth are interesting solutions to that problem, but the ecosystem isn’t quite there. But if it was, it’d be a nice way to manage a blog without requiring too much expertise.
- root_axis 4y agoExactly. What's more, the masses were driven by marketing budgets to the internet for megacorp internet products, they were never going to come online all on their own based on a motivation to read personal blogs.