I found out yesterday that Jeff’s mom has a blog, has had a blog for 7 21 years! And Jeff wanted to connect me and mine to her and hers. This morning I got the personal intro by email, and it was just so charming and great. Both Jeff’s intro and Cathy’s reply. A connection is already connecting. It’s better to read blogs of people you know in real life, even if they’re a step removed. It jumpstarts the peek behind the curtain that sometimes takes years to see. Those little details that aren’t the main subject or theme of the long running blog.

Cathy’s blog is all personal updates, poetry, and pictures. So it’ll be interesting to see what turns up from the other side of the curtain. What I really like though is all of those pictures.1 Check it out at cathysblog.org.

How did we get here? Last night over dinner preparations Jeff and I were talking about how great small blogging is for the readers, particularly those of us using RSS readers. The posts show up, they are not too frequent, the thing is posted because the author cared enough to write it or wanted to share it. They’re in chronological order and the burden of keeping up is only as bad as your own lack of curation; you can catch up after a short gap. Small blogs are visibly not a side hustle of some kind. There’s none of that SEO nonsense. If I’ve been following someone for years and years, I’ve seen those rare glimpses of the real life happening behind the screen. It builds a genuine connection, I care about their struggles, and am glad that they persist at posting. I can see more of the whole person. Jeff and I both agreed about this. It’s just better that way, more genuine.

The other way of running things is fine too. Running a blog like a business is just not the same thing at all. I hope we keep blogging, despite what’s being said these days about AI and Google Zero and all that. I just don’t see how the value of connecting with others can be strip mined by the LLMs and somehow captured into them. Maybe for those run-like-a-business blogs, where they are trying to sell something. But for the small bloggers that are putting out their experiences and thoughts, the value is the connection between them and the individual readers. The value lives in the people that are participating. It’s the exchange, even if it’s mostly one way, there is a connection there.2 I’m looking for more of that and maybe even some bidirectional exchange.34

jg

footnotes

  1. I’ve mentioned before how much I like blogs that have pictures. It will surely come up again. ↩︎

  2. It’s kind of like how Coke wants people to drink more Coke, but everyone just wants water. Water is the best. Coke is a business, looking to exchange your money for some water with extra steps, some of them not so great. I just want water most of the time, which is a direct connection to the good stuff. And water is mostly almost free, as long as we keep it that way. Well, the analogy isn’t perfected yet. ↩︎

  3. I did add all the comments backend stuff for someone besides myself, right? ↩︎

  4. These are just general small blogger sentiments. I’m not looking at anyone in particular. Really. ↩︎

updates

I got the update that Cathy has been blogging for 21 years! My mistake. I had only checked the look back on her current blog; she had been on a different platform for many years before moving.

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