Bloggiest Blogger
Blogger shone as a neatly encapsulated term of art. It rose from geeky origins to stand stolid and strong as the central pillar of "new media" only to be subsumed by the rise of apps and content creators. I miss it.
I put my first website together in the summer of 2000, timed to coincide with my upcoming move to Japan. My website, Autoneuroticism1, would be a record of my travels through Japan and regale my readership with my wit and erudition. Once moved into my shared apartment with a brand new Sony Vaio laptop plugged in and ready, I wrote out my stories, formatted them manually in HTML, and made the weekly, very expensive modem connection to my rented server to upload them. It was, in all respects, a blog, if only I had known the word.
Autoneuroticism lasted just over a year. There are still a few posts left standing deep in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine2, but the site itself is long gone, felled by the expense of international phone calls and the increasing availability of new platforms like Blogger. Which, to be fair, had actually existed before I moved to Japan, I just hadn't heard of it until 2001. I made an account and started up a new blog. It lasted right up until I decided I wanted a more professional webpage to use as a photo resume. I dusted off the old HTML and CSS skills and moved over to Wordpress. And so on and so forth.
But the change behind the scenes, the one harder to document, lay in my description of myself. When I first learned the word blogger3, I refused to describe myself as one. I was a writer. I just happened to do most of my writing online. My blogs made up but a fraction of my writing portfolio. Would you like to see my sample pages?
It wasn't just me. Every writer I knew kept their blog as a calling card, something to attract publishers and editors, to give the writer a way in to something bigger and better. Even in t.v. shows like Californication, when the hero, down-on-his-luck Hank Moody needs to make some quick cash, he still turns up his nose at a paying gig as a blogger for an L.A. newspaper. I would have killed to work as a blogger for an L.A. newspaper.
Then some bloggers started making money. They sold their blogs or their names and wrote books and movies and speeches. Maybe being a blogger wasn't such a bad thing after all?
Right around this same time, a new(er) form of media began to take shape: podcasting and, it too, became a series of nouns. You were a podcaster, you made a podcast. Occasionally, you podcasted4. Soon thereafter, yet another new word emerged, marking the third pillar of the new media: YouTuber. Sprinkled in between these three squatted several lesser terms, comprised of old terms newly prefaced by digital or web or even online.
Sometime in this heady heyday, the number of blogging tools exploded and each tried to differentiate itself by adding some new feature or central theme around which bloggers could write. Microblogs , datalogs, and lifeblogs, oh my.
It took about a decade before the "Blogging is Dead!" headlines became an annual event. Corporate shenanigans and new technologies tanked a lot of blogging platforms before they could ever achieve the status and profitability they would have needed to prove themselves viable to shareholders. Social media, with its attendant walled gardens and captive audiences, proved much easier to monetize; smartphone apps were easier to use.
So, blogging died and the profession of blogger is no more. End of story.
In reality, this reality anyway, blogging simply changed. When I first joined SubStack in 2018, I saw it as a successor to blogging platforms like Six Apart's Vox:
Developed as a Web 2.0-oriented service, Vox emphasized integrated social networking and community interaction features; a simple, clean aesthetic, with an easy-to-use posting system; granular privacy controls for content viewing permissions; and rich media content, including integration with various web services such as Amazon.com, YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket.
Add in a direct to inbox component and, well, I don't think I was wrong. What I didn't predict was how much content creator would become an all-or-nothing arrangement. Blogger, podcaster, and YouTuber are all the same job these days. And if that wasn't true three years ago, A.I. is rapidly making it so. The modern blogger has to write posts, illustrate them, and make short-form video and audio segments to promote and share them. As I said, blogger has been subsumed by the more generous and expansive content creator5.
The question is, then, is blogger still a viable descriptor? Is it still a valid and valuable subset of writer? I think so. I hope so.
I still describe myself as a writer. It encompasses all the different types of writing I do. But I was cleaning out some papers the other day and came across a business card some friends of mine had made for me, circa 2005. It's a plain white card with a typewriter in the middle. It says, "Have blog, will travel." It was true then, it’s true now. Just a blogger after all.
I was, and am, inordinately proud of that site. One of the best things I ever did, one of the first things I made as an adult, was a book containing all the writing and all the art. It’s in my box of things to show my kid one day, maybe.
I say that, but as of posting this, I have been unable to get the Wayback Machine to work. Everything I search for returns an error. So, who knows?
Blogger was not a universally adored term. There was a sizable contingent that wanted to use the word bloggist. We felt it was more in line with journalist, diarist, memoirist, etc.
Believe it or not, there was actually some debate as to whether the past tense form should be podcast or podcasted.
I’m not even getting into content creator’s hipper, shinier, rhinestone encrusted cousin, influencer. That’s a word that just needs to die.