I remember when blogging was the big thing. It was social media before the age of Twitter, Friendster (I'm dating myself, I know) and Facebook. And my decision to blog again - aside from having a curated space of sorts to show off my writing style - got me to thinking back to when I was one of the bloggers littering the worldwide web with thoughts from my very own soapbox.
(Not that this blog isn't any different from how things were back then, except I litter quite less - something I hope to change - and I'm hoping is less litter, more nuggets of semi-wisdom)
One of the things that set the standard for how search optimization was to evolve back in the day was linking to each other. Pre-blogging, links to other sites on your page were virtually unheard of, because you risked losing your audience to another service - because most websites back then were online portals of corporations that hosted information on that corp's products and their contact information. You couldn't buy things off the internet outside of eBay (at least not yet), and selling from a physical storefront was less an option, and more of a reality.
Blogging introduced a concept that, for the lack of a better term, we can probably call social linking. Bloggers like myself would occasionally, or frequently, link out to other bloggers in their own little blogging neighborhood to shout out, gain clout, and/or catch the attention of a specific individual. Most of the time, we were doing this to socialize via the web, hence the name, but by 2005 it'd become a viable form of traffic for a new breed of online sellers, and so precious blogspace with decently-sized traffic became a media buying haven, where people shilled links that pointed towards these sellers.
And since we were social people on the web, we left comments on each others' blogs - be it through posts, shoutboxes or tagboards, or even in visitor logs. This was something that was adopted by social media services out of the box, with Twitter, Friendster, Facebook, and even MySpace letting users comment on posts of their friends. And again, it was co-opted by marketers working on on-page SEO back in the day, hiring teams of spam linkers to flood post comments with backlinks to their websites.
Even the practice of mixing media, utilizing music, visuals, and text together, was something bloggers practiced back in the day. Make no mistake, we still do this to this day, but I guess it's safe to say that it's the same...but different.
Today, I'm missing the authenticity of a lot of the short and long form posts that come out on social media. Back when we were blogging, you can expect to read a lot of different things from people who were blogging. Some of them were precursors to shitposting and vaguebooking, true, but we took the bad with the good back then. The content was almost always fresh, and you knew you were getting a story that came from somebody's (admittedly, foolishly young) heart.
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