The Days of Blogs Gone By

Let me tell you about a day gone by...

There was a day when blogs looked like blogs. No one knew how to make a Blogspot template look like a self-promotional web-page.

Your blog picture was taken by your spouse on vacation... not a professional photographer. You had to crop half the photo to make it work. And we liked it that way.

Forget RSS feeds. We actually visited people's pages and read their blogrolls and admired the colors they chose in their blog templates. It was all part of the experience.

There were no ads. We wrote what we wanted to write without getting paid for it.

We even said negative things at times. Burned bridges. That was the excitement of being a blogger.

Nobody made money off blogs. We lost money. They raised questions of cost-effectiveness and productivity in the workplace. And we liked this tension. It made us feel renegade.

Nobody tweeted. We just made long lists of little thoughts and posted them on our blogs.

There were no blog celebrities. It was a free exchange of ideas. And the best ideas won.

I miss those days. =)

Comments

[christy]

me too

[Ron Edmondson]

Yea, me too! I had a blog during those days, gave it up because those days were gone, and then gave up again and joined the "new day" of blogging. I'm not making money, a celebrity yet, or learned not to burn bridges, but for the rest of the new day of bloggging...I'm in.

Great post to make me think.

[Jason Curlee]

dang wish you had some color here....j/k ;)

yeah I was thinking about this...where and when did it all go south...

wonder if we can bring those days back

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=640370187]

Here's to not being a celebrity, having no advertising, writing what I want to write without losing or making money for it, and being able to say negative things as there are no flammable bridges.

It may not be glamorous.

But it works.

[Paul Stewart]

Great post Ben!

[twitter.com/NeilAJohnston]

Nice! Retro post...

[daniel d]

I agree with the idea of simplicity, raw ideas and just being real regardless if it creates tension or not... but I think the idea of blog celebrities, etc just happens as a byproduct of great content. Sure, there are people who game the system to inflate their traffic, etc but at the end of the day, great content still wins.

[Michael]

And remember when hamburgers cost a nickel.

[Terrace Crawford]

yea, some bloggers have truly lost steam. a few of my favorite reads haven't posted in over a month!

thankfully, here at benarment.com, i can still get my daily dose.

--Terrace Crawford
www.terracecrawford.com
www.twitter.com/terracecrawford

[Mark Jaffrey]

My blog is obviously still v 1.0. Dated but honest :-)

Haven't felt compelled to switch to a spiffy Wordpress design yet. Sometimes I feel guilty about that and sometimes I'm proud of it.

[James]

You missed one off...

The days of when you would allow negative comments on your blog!

[Chris Surratt]

I remember those days. I had a blog then.

[brad]

Well, if that's the way you feel, then why don't you--

Oh, I see what you did there!

[Shawn]

I feel like I'm still there...plus, I put ads on my blog when I first started, but I make nothing off of it...don't even realize they're there.

[modalert]

fanaticalA