https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/05/the-blogosphere-is-in-full-bloom-the-rest-of-the-internet-has-wilted-dave-winer

Nice. I really think that as generative AI improves, blogs by actual humans will have a resurgence. I don't necessarily think there will be *money* there, but I think more people will read blogs.

In the vast vast sweep of history, money has almost never been a motive for writing and even publishing until the last 250 years. Most of the great literature before Rousseau and Voltaire and Diderot was written with little or no desire to make people pay for the written word. Sure, Shakespeare wanted people to buy tickets to watch plays at the Globe. But Shakespeare certainly had no plan to sell a bunch of books or license plays to other theaters.

I had a completely new to me experience about a month ago (Labor Day Sunday). I was talking to this guy and introduced myself. He said that I had been mentioned in the acknowledgements of a climbing guidebook, which I knew, and that next to my name was the URL for my blog, which I did not know. He went to my blog, liked the essays, bought my book and said he had really liked the book.

I have made my blog "tracking free" so I have no idea in a given month if it even gets a single visitor. I also have disabled comments on most posts, so I don't get comments either. So it was very strange to meet someone face to face who was a reader fan.

>full bloom

There are some really good, thoughtful bloggers out there.

Feedle is a search engine for blog feeds and podcasts and a good way to find them.
https://feedle.world

Anecdotally, I've noticed blogs and blog-like pages creeping into my tech feeds over the last year or thereabouts. A few have even made the cut and have been posted here.

I was at a conference last week and one of the speakers was from an agency focused on marketing to Gen Z. He mentioned that Gen Z is starting to tire of the endless firehose of social media and is looking more and more to blogs, communities, and content platforms. Platforms like Tumblr are seeing a resurgence with younger users.

I could see platforms like Substack and Patreon growing over the next couple years as well. Since they are paid platforms they filter out a bunch of the junk and don't necessarily on traffic from Google or other search platforms.