e-mail, sometimes.
Hello,
Hello?
Is this thing on? In October of 2008, Paul Boutin wrote on Wired a piece titled “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004”. It’s archived here.
It has not aged well! The basic premise is that blogs have become TOO BIG and you can’t get popular self-publishing anymore. They are too impersonal now. They are too difficult for managing rich media. More than anything, your blog will attract “insult commenter”s and hecklers.
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.
Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.
The new social platforms, including a then-still-new Twitter, allowed for immediacy, and you could easily post pictures and video, and you could directly interact with people who were, I assume, all very nice. That does sound pleasant!
It very much isn’t now, and hasn’t been for a long time. Many books were written, and are being written, about the horrors unleashed by those centralized social media platforms. I won’t add to that now.
Paul Boutin’s 2008 complaints about blogging are what make it so appealing in 2025. It’s a slow web. It’s a quiet web. You’re not blasting people with immediate takes. It’s deliberate and flimsy and personal and perpetually under construction. It’s the opposite of The Who Cares Era.
For me it also means starting from zero all over again. I’ve lost touch with a lot of friends and people I respect, all entirely online, because of how “impersonal” those platforms have become; because of how facile the interactions are. Today, I’d rather thrive in obscurity than be another data point in a constant stream of doom.
The very process of creating this and its site, remaking my blog slash personal site, and writing, lots of writing and editing, has been cathartic. I missed it. And it’s rough and missing lots of polish but here it is with some initial thoughts about the longer road to here: https://the-inbetween.com.
Do say hello, if only to tell me you received this (it is the first one going out from a domain that some email providers might think is a joke, which it is but it’s also valid.)
Signing off, sometimes.