Personal Blogs

This site had the right idea 11 1/2 years ago.

Has everyone else been copying? A decade ago this was a novel way of doing things, where you all joined in, read each other's stuff.

It is striking that so much of this has the attitude of Web 2.0 an expression that was coined until 2001 or 2002.

In this community pairing up with a designer was de riguer. There wasn't the expectation that someone would have the mindset and desire both to write and design. This form of participation has been lost with the development of free templates picked from galleries. You don't have a relationship with the designer for a start ... discussing what you would like and their suggesting what they can do.

And most profoundly of all, and better than anything I've come across since, you create and control your 'buddy list' and learn who, most importantly, is posting on a regular basis. Bird of a Feather do flock together ... the most important criteria of all is that those who write want to be with others who write.

You learn to spend as much time reading and commenting on the diaries of others. You also learn to respond when they post, which you can do here.

I thought I was doing well to reach 10,000 entries. There are some who have 20,000. A group I established had some ground rules: minimum entry 1,000 words. This was to distinguish us from those who thought keeping a blog was about posting a single line.

Web 2.0 in 1999?

It has the hallmarks.

The profound shift we writers had to make was to stop posting copyright notices on every word we posted.  How often I've been plagiarised is another matter. Posting story ideas ... then not writing the story may be daft.

Join. Still free. Still there. Still loads of fun. Inventive. Open. Extraordinary.

And one of the few orginal online diary platforms around. Live Journal and Word Press followed some years after.