Remember the golden age of MP3 blogs? Probably around 2005, 2006. Give or take a year or two on either end. For a music obsessive such it was a glorious time. I discovered so much music that way, learned so much about music I previously had a passing familiarity with. What were some of the big ones? Off the top of my head I can only recall WFMU's Beware the Blog, spoilt victorian child ... ?
Anyway, now that we're all internetting like it's the 2000s, what with Mastodon bringing the social sphere of that era back, (BBS, The Well, the AVClub comment sections, MySpace), I've seen chatter in the social cosmic unconsciousness about how we need to bring back blogs. It's pretty much common wisdom that when Google deep-sixed Reader (presumably because it couldn't figure out how to monetize it) it laid waste to the whole blog ecosystem. Well, that and Twitter.
Because I bet you'd also find it true amongst the greater blogosphere, that Twitter had a hand in killing the blog era. Let me paraphrase something I once saw on Twitter1, "Most books should be a magazine article. Most magazine articles should be a blog post. Most blog posts should a Twitter thread, most tweets thread should be a single tweet." This is glib to be certain. But as someone who started his professional life working at a publishing company, a vast majority of books aren't worth the paper they're printed on. And a lot of magazine articles aren't needed to be committed to prosperity. And I think a lot of bloggers realized that it was easier to write a sentence or two rather than several paragraphs. Just speaking for myself, when I had launched digitallofi.com v2.0 it was just easier to figure out how to squeeze my posts into 140 characters (remember those days!) then login to a different site and spend some time actually writing prose. I was glued to Twitter so might as well post there. And there was that immediate dopamine rush of the stars (again, remember the time when there were stars not hearts/likes) from mutuals or the occasional stranger.2 And most readers were fine with a couple lines rather than clicking through to whatever blog.
But if I'm going to start blogging myself, I also want to start following blogs. So I posed the question on Mastodon about RSS readers. If you web search you get a lot of hits for subscription services, and I'm not going to pay a monthly fee for some SASS to catch RSS feeds.
Thinking of it, I could configure something on this site to perform the task.
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1 I have no idea who it was, so here's to you anonymous Twitter user for a quip that is more pithy than true.
2 I definitely have a big post on Twitter and Mastodon coming; it's one of the reasons I wanted crank up the blog again.