Blogs Usurped the Role of Web Communities
I aquired the purelyrandom.com domain in 2000 when I was a sophomore in college and wanted to create a web site that people would actually read. Most of you will realize that this was right in the heart of the dot-com era, and most everyone was obsessed with this very same idea. In fact, I read a book on marketing for the web at some point and came out from it realizing that dynamic content was crucial to success. When people know a web site will change on a regular basis, they’ll make plans to come back. You need to provide a constant stream of new content, or your site becomes irrelevant. From the perspective of a nerdy college student who works too hard, the problem is actually producing the necessary stream of content. Who has time for that?
The solution that I found was taking the pressure off just me and creating a site to which a number of people could post. This wasn’t a revolutionary idea or anything, but we certainly didn’t exist in a world where you could just download an open source framework for maintaining such a site (or at least an accessible instance of such a tool). I put some clunky PHP code together that stored posts in a MySQL database, and had a solution: my friends could sign up and post their own ramblings to augment my own. I had to write less, and the site had far more content than it would from just me. I was happy, and many of my friends had a chance to keep up with each other on the Internet.
That last sentence sounds an awful lot like I’m talking about blogging, but that’s not really the case. It served the same role that blogging does not, but it was a single site that housed a well-contained community. If someone wanted to post their rambling thoughts, it got mixed in with content from everyone else. But at the same time, those friends would not have had an opportunity to post material without every finding some web space and puting together some pages of their own. Who has time for that?
Now fast forward several years to a point where I let that site fall apart and be overcome by spam that I didn’t have time to go in and clean out. The site was ugly and the code running it was clunky, and for a little while I wanted to revamp the whole site and resurrect it to its former “glory.” But then I realized how stupid that would be. Why would people come post to my page? If they had something to say, they would just open up an account on LiveJournal or Blogger or any number of other free blogging services out there. Hence, I ended up making the decision to resurrect the site as my own blog. I don’t have the benefit of other people posting content to my page (and boosting the flow of new content), but I don’t care.
Why? Because the world has changed since 2000. People started following blogs as a collective rather than following just a handful of sites. In that sense, other people posting content to their own blogs increase the flow of content coming out of the blogosphere and indirectly helps my own site. My friends can subscribe to my RSS feed or include me in their LiveJournal friends page, and every time they check up on blogs in general, they’ll have an opportunity to see if I posted anything new. I might not post for a month, but they’ll keep checking my site for new content–because their other friends have been posting, and there’s been new content all month long appearing right beside my stagnant blog.
I guess I just find the progress of these socio-technical trends on the Internet to be interesting. We’re evolving as a community to selectively integrate new technological tools into our lives. As new tools become accepted, they change the realities of publishing material on the Internet. Then again, maybe I just wrote this post because I’m obsessed with the past and like to look back fondly on the original Purely Random (while draging others through the history of this domain—whether they like it or not. Maybe it’s not interested at all and you either figured this out a while ago or just don’t care. Oh well.