2024-10-11

Journal

- Note taken on Fri Oct 11, 202415:47

Reading about [[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2024/10/10/ribbonfarm-is-retiring/][Ribbon Farm]] closing up shop prompted a lot of thoughts that I

wasn't expecting this morning. First off, I never spent much time following

the blog during it's hayday. I really only began reading it over the past

year. But more than that, I hadn't thought much about the changing internet

landscape from the perspective of someone who HAD NOT participated in the

early blog days.

Blogging only really blew up in the mid to late 2000s, though if I had been

asked to guess this morning I would have said the 90s, but that's me

misremembering things again.

No, there was a golden age of people posting things on non-paywalled sites and

building up enough of a following that bloggers became the source of what was

new. Perhaps some of that has shifted to Youtubers , but it's hard to

overstate how much blogging shifted the landscape of media and news coverage.

Of course, the story is complicated by the rise of walled gardens like

Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter. But the fact remains, blogging used

to be important.

These days, as Ribbon Farm closing demonstrates, it is much less important.

"Influences" have entered the zeitgeist and more and more the question is not

the information richness of a person's communication channel, but the

monetization of it. Of course, the children of newspaper magnates could

probably make a compelling argument that not that much has changed. And yet, I

don't find videos as compelling as written words, and the individual blogger

is a big part of what made them compelling.