The Glory Days

It's an indictment on Internet society that of the 118 blogs I follow via RSS, only three of them provide regular updates. It's a sign of just how far we've come (fallen?) from the days when content was king, and things like SEO and reach and even readership were afterthoughts to the actual writing process. I'm hardly the model net citizen, but from the start all those 14 years ago I knew I'd never allow ads on this site, nor track who does (or doesn't) read these pages. Instead we now create quicker bites (usually images) and these primarily to be seen, which sounds innocent enough but can also be seen as the root of most of the uglier sides of social media today.

This cynicism and grumpiness comes with age, of course. 14 years is a big chunk of both my life and that of the Internet, and I like to think some kind of prestige comes with that. Of course the real irony is that with this transformation of how the Internet is used, the content that was so easy to create has now become difficult to even start... so any denial that feedback doesn't matter is probably a bit cheeky.

On the other hand, a fair few of those dynamics and relationships have transformed into bigger and better things - so much so that I almost forget where they all started. And so we end with what is probably the most vacuous of life's lessons: things change, sometimes for the worse but often for the better, and so the real value in the world is in the essence of these things and not what they look like.

And if that means it's the blogosphere that gets put on the altar... well maybe that's not that big a price to pay after all.