Still blogging in 2017

Tim Bray is still blogging in 2017.

I wonder what the Web will be like when we’re a couple more generations in? I’m pretty sure that as long as it remains easy to fill a little bit of the great namespace with your words and pictures, people will.

The great danger is that the Web’s future is mall-like: No space really public, no storefronts but national brands’, no visuals composed by amateurs, nothing that’s on offer just for its own sake, and for love.

Not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this on here before, but I often think of blogging as vaudeville to social media’s moving pictures (aka “movies”). It’s not that blogging and vaudeville are any less entertaining or engaging than they used to be,¹ but movies in the 20s/30s and social media like Facebook and Snapchat (and media companies like Vox and BuzzFeed that leverage them well) provided tremendous quantities of scale and integrated means of production. Ok, the analogy needs a little work, but as Bray suggests, a few of us diehards will still be hoofing it here on our small stages until they sweep us off the stage. (via @cbredesen)

1. Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is basically vaudeville for the 2010s.↩

• Tim Bray
• weblogs