Can the blogosphere be reconnected?

Some recent articles have had me thinking about blogs, what we had, what we lost, and how we might be able to get it back. As massive social media sites have brought the global conversation under centralized control, concentrating the power to exclude people and opinions in the hands of censors who are not well-disposed to people of my political and religious persuasion, I find myself wistfully remembering the days when the conversation took place between independent bloggers on their own sites.

Tim Challies, a Canadian pastor who has been blogging for 5,553 consecutive days, has noticed recently that many of the blogs he followed and found profitable have ceased publication, and he has begun a series of posts on the topic. His specific concern is with blogs by Christians about their faith, but it could be extended to political blogs, which have also been in steep decline.

He describes the characteristics of three categories of blog -- the individual blog, the group blog, and the ministry blog. The latter -- run by an organization as part of its overall web presence and public identity -- Challies argues is not actually a blog.

What is essential to those ministry sites (the ability to solicit, accept, reject, and edit articles) contradicts an essential element of a blog (the ability to write without editorial control). Where blogging is a medium by and for amateurs, ministry blogs have a paradigm that is far more professional. Again, they have their place but, while they may displace blogs, they don't quite replace them.

And as I think about the future of Christian blogging, this is one of my foremost concerns--that as bloggers migrate away from personal blogs to instead submit their content to ministry sites, we are giving away the ability to say what we want to say, when we want to say it, and how we want to say it. We are also diminishing the training ground in which we grow in our ability to express ourselves with greater skill. That's not at all to impugn the motives or track records of the various ministries, but to say we will develop better writing and writers when we can write substantially and freely.

Ministry blogs have parallels in the political world: Blogs and news sites run by think-tanks, newspaper op-eds, the websites of politically-focused magazines -- all these involve a level of editorial control that constrains a writer's freedom to choose a topic or express an unpopular opinion.

In a second article, Challies gives seven reasons why a Christian should keep blogging or consider starting a blog, and most of them could apply beyond the realm of faith blogging. Challies talks about an individual blogger being able to build a personal connection with his audience and reach them with ideas that they might not otherwise encounter, because they aren't perusing the big ministry web sites. He writes:

Just because something has been said on one of these sites, doesn't mean that it won't be beneficial to say it elsewhere. If you can speak to a crucial topic and reach fifty or a hundred people who otherwise wouldn't consider it, you've done good work. You may find the most effective way to serve others isn't to get the message out to the widest audience, but to your audience--the one you've built a relationship with over time, the one who likes you, not just what you say.

I don't know that I built a readership that likes me, but I think there was a group of readers who looked to BatesLine to act as a filter -- a blogger who shared their values and could be trusted to curate a selection of useful news and ideas, particularly around election time.

So given that the solo blog still has value, how can we regain the visibility it once had?

We are at least a decade beyond what might be called the golden age of blogging. By the mid-2000s, blog software was stable and accessible without requiring significant technical skills. Google had purchased Blogger, and clunky add-on features (remember comments via HaloScan? photo hosting via Picasa?) were integrated into the blog platform. WordPress emerged as an easy-to-use alternative with a creative user base. Individual voices proliferated.

But it was tough to organize all those voices and keep up with what people were saying. How could you keep up with all of the sites you might like to follow? For me as a blogger, it was important to know what other bloggers were talking about, as it would be fodder for my own blog.

Conversations across websites happened as one blogger would post an entry linking to another blogger's writing; the software would automatically generate a trackback or pingback, creating a link on the other site back to the commenting article and notifying the writer of the original item. But unscrupulous website owners found the mechanism a convenient way to plant inbound links on other sites to boost search-engine page rank, and legitimate trackbacks were lost in a sea of spam, forcing bloggers to adopt a sequence of strategies to thwart trackback spammers. Most bloggers wound up turning off the capability as not worth the hassle.

We used Technorati to find out who was linking to us and to track blog posts on topics of interest. Blogging software could be configured so that, when a new post was published, a notification would be sent to Technorati, which could read special topic tags embedded in the post.

Rob Neppell (a.k.a. N. Z. Bear -- "a bear, the world, and a strong urge to hibernate") had a blog called The Truth Laid Bear, and he developed the TTLB Ecosystem, calculating blog popularity each week based on inbound links reported by the SiteMeter software (another third-party blog add-on), and grouping them in a cleverly named hierarchy of fauna, from "Insignificant Microbes" to "Higher Beings," the latter of which consisted of the ten most popular blogs. On November 27, 2005, BatesLine had reached "Large Mammal" status (my peak ecosystem level), ranked #695, with 200 unique inbound links and 697 average daily unique visits. On that particular week, Michelle Malkin's blog was #1, followed by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, and the Daily Kos.

Blog carnivals were another means of helping readers discover good content. Bloggers would email links to their best recent writing to the carnival editor, who would publish the links to the best submissions in that week's carnival entries. Often the editorship and hosting responsibilities would rotate among participating blogs. A blog carnival was often focused on a particular topic or niche, but the most venerable of the bunch, Carnival of the Vanities, was a catchall. Here's the 5th edition of Carnival of the Vanities, from October 2002. Charles G. Hill at Dustbury reported at the time that the "first day of the Carnival of the Vanities gives this site about a 25 to 30 percent spike in traffic -- at least, on those weeks when I manage to come up with something to submit."

The blogroll was a more automated method of blogging connectivity. At first these were handcrafted HTML links in the sidebar to favorite blogs, but there was a third-party service called blogrolling.com, which allowed you to manage your list of favorite blogs online and incorporate your list dynamically on your blog using a snippet of Javascript. By 2007, I had 228 blogs on my blogroll, just prior to a planned pruning. I had it set to show the most recently updated blogs at the top, in hopes of rewarding blogpals who were consistent in their writing with more visits from my readers. This snapshot of BatesLine from November 6, 2005, shows my personal blogroll, plus three other blogroll groups in which I participated -- the League of Reformed Bloggers (for Calvinist Christians, founded by Tim Challies and David Wayne, aka Jollyblogger), Wictory Wednesday (blogging to encourage volunteering and donations for the George W. Bush re-election campaign and for Republican Senate candidates in the 2004 election), and Blogs for Terri (support for Terri Schiavo's fight for life). The incentive for posting these group blogrolls was to boost the number of inbound links and thus the page rank of members, and it offered the possibility of gaining new readers through serendipitous visits from people browsing the blogrolls.

As a further service to the readers and aide to myself, and in hopes of drawing visitors to BatesLine in between my own posts, I set up an account with NewsGator and added pages showing the most recent posts from my favorite bloggers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and around the world. These NewsGator-driven blogroll pages provided a link, title, and timestamp, plus a brief snippet, for the latest 50 posts in each category. It was a quick and convenient way to get a sense of what people were talking about. It had the added benefit of surfacing posts from bloggers who had written something after a long period of inactivity, work I might have missed if I had had to visit their site to find it.

Most blogs published some sort of syndication feed, which could be read by an aggregator like NewsGator. These syndication feeds were written in a type of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) called RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Aggregators would periodically query the RSS feeds for each site then blend them together into a single feed, usually sorted in reverse chronological order.

Locally, Bobby Holt, who had a blog called Tulsa Topics, built an aggregator page at TulsaBloggers.net, featuring the latest posts from a handful of Tulsa-focused blogs.

NewsGator eliminated its services to bloggers in 2009, at which point I was subscribed to nearly 300 RSS feeds. Google Reader offered a similar service, so I exported my blogroll OPML files from NewsGator, imported them to Google Reader, then changed the Javascript to pull latest articles from my Google Reader aggregated feeds, but with a loss of some features. In 2013, Google dropped Reader; some believed it was an attempt to drive traffic to its GooglePlus social media platform. When I downloaded my OPML from Google Reader for the last time, in July 2013, it had 384 feeds, of which 161 had some connection to Oklahoma.

In the meantime, social media sites were growing. Facebook and Twitter provided convenient ways to follow a stream of news and ideas. Initially, these sites would show you everything posted by the accounts you chose to follow, with the most recent first. Over time, they switched to a curated approach, driven by the desire to generate revenue, in which an algorithm would determine which posts you would see, and in what order. If you wanted your Facebook followers to see everything you posted, you'd have to pay for the privilege.

Social media has also redirected and dissipated the energy that writers used to vent in blog posts. Once you've responded to some outrage on Twitter or Facebook, there isn't the urgency to address the topic on your blog.

Without a readily-available RSS aggregator, and with social media giants filtering bloggers' attempts to notify readers about new posts, it was harder to keep touch with what independent bloggers were writing. Bloggers saw their traffic diminish and with it the motivation to write.

Nevertheless, there are still bloggers that are plugging away on their own sites, and nearly all of them publish an RSS feed by default, allowing for aggregation. SoonerPolitics.org has pages aggregating feeds from Oklahoma bloggers, using a service called Feedwind.

I recently came across a way to do my own aggregation here at BatesLine and am in the process of testing the system, figuring out the best way to embed it in the site, and rebuilding the list of RSS feeds, finding which ones have moved, which are utterly gone, and which have been taken over by spammers. No promises, but my intention is to provide public pages showing the latest posts by bloggers of interest in several categories, as before, including a pages for Tulsa blogs, Oklahoma blogs, and a variety of other topics. The hope is to have a permanent solution that doesn't depend on a third-party service that could go the way of NewsGator and Google Reader.

MORE:

Here's a helpful glossary of blogging on Wikipedia.

Charles G. Hill "take[s] arms against a sea of comments" with a blogger's soliloquy.

At Motherboard, Sinclair Target writes on the rise and demise of RSS. What was expected to be "a way for both users and content aggregators to create their own customized channels out of everything the web had to offer." The story quotes, Kevin Werbach, writing in 1999, that RSS "would evolve into the core model for the Internet economy, allowing businesses and individuals to retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope." How we got from that decentralized vision to today's corporate-owned information silos is a story of clashing visions and dissipated effort.