Permeable Membrane Blogging
Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WiFi hadn’t yet migrated to phones, blogging used to feel like the first step of an interactive process. You’d post something, and other folks would respond on their blogs, setting up a slow moving conversation as other folks joined in on their blogs. Interactivity was part of the appeal, and even in the absence of interactive responses, the potential of interactivity remained. The membrane between you and the readership was thin, and highly permeable. Over the years permeability feels like it’s fallen away. Conversations sped up as responses moved to tools like Facebook and Twitter, or became siloed to the comments section because folks weren’t maintaining their own feed of information. The nature of blogs transformed as folks figured out how to take this weird conversation platform and monetise it as a content publisher, setting off a boom of increasingly focused blogs devoted to tightly constrained topics, evergreen content
