Why Blogs Die

Do you remember the first time you actually connected with a computer through the phone to some other computer, and wrote something that you imagined someone would read?

There had to be a first time, and I'll bet you remember it. If you're relatively young, say under 50, people around you, including your parents, may have been doing this already, and it was normal to you to hop on. The word "email" was probably spelled "e-mail" and when some website (web-site) was mentioned on the news or in a commercial, they went through the whole thing: "h-t-t-p-colon-forward-slash-forward-slash-double-you-double-you-double-you-dot-web-site-dot-com" or something very similar. Now no one even bothers with the double-yous.

I had resisted the whole "connecting with the computer" thing. To me, a computer, circa 1993, was just something you used to write things or design things or play games. I'd had a computer for almost 10 years prior to that, but back in the dawn of personal computing, connecting to other computers was for extreme techies; very, very probably whom you didn't know and whom even your friends' friends didn't know.

But eventually the time came when the pressure was too great -- your elder brother was "e-mailing" everyone and you weren't. In my case I was lured by a service called a "BBS" (bulletin board service) sponsored by the Montreal Mirror called "Babylon."

It wasn't the World Wide Web. It was a dialup thing that you didn't have to pay for; it had several different sections that we'd now call forums (maybe that's what they were called then too) and you'd post and people would respond etc.

Well, I actually went out and bought my first modem. I think it was a 14.4-baud thing. Whatever it was, it was slow, but slow compared to what I didn't know so I didn't care. And I remember actually "posting" something to Babylon. I have no idea what, but I remember being embarrassed, frightened, excited and weirded out about what would happen next. And someone must have responded, because the rest is history. That went on for about a year and then the Web started to infiltrate, I moved on and up and so did everyone else, and Babylon shut its doors a couple of years later and it was to each his own.

In 1996 or so I learned HTML and actually created a website, called boulevardmontreal.com  (you can still see parts of it at the wayback machine). It wasn't its own domain, of course -- I piggybacked it off my ISP. But believe it or not, I started writing articles for it, as well as restaurant reviews. I'd make general comments, or post something about food or something I'd cooked, all the while having no idea whether anyone was reading it, since there was no comments section and I don't even think my email address was anywhere anyway.

So imagine my surprise when the doyenne of food writing at the time, Lesley Chesterman (critic at the Gazette) somehow found my email address and told me she got some of her ideas of where to go review from some of the stuff I'd written. Wow-wee-wah-hey was what I remember thinking at the time.

That prompted me to create montrealfood.com which at its height was pretty influential, until everyone started going to restaurants and photographing the food and writing about it. That took care of that, and the rest is, again, history. A turbulent period of commercialization began and now it has come down to a smooth system of websites masquerading as blogging sites that "blog" about restaurants and I became totally unnecessary.

Then the great Blog Monster reared its ugly head and suddenly everyone who was anyone had a blog.

These evolved into two camps: the blog-to-have-a-blog blog and the blog-for-exposure/monetary gain blog and all the permutations in between. The former, thankfully, seem to have wilted, dried up and been abandoned and the latter have either become too commercialised to be called a blog or devolved into extreme-niche affairs.

The question is, what really was a blog in the first place, and if it was definable, is that which it was now formally non-existent or near to being so?

I will, of course, always deny that what you are reading now is, or ever has been, a "blog." It's always simply been the ramblings of whatever came to mind, the topics of which were always totally unpredictable. One of the most totally unfocused groups of writing possibly ever assembled upon the face of the Earth. Which is, of course, the only way I'd have it.

But back to the question: is the blog, as I've tried to define here, dead, in decline, or has it simply morphed into something else?

To me, Facebook and Twitter are manufactured, cynical entities with the ultimate objective of enriching their creators. They will morph into some other entity, as they simply can't stay the way they are.

But the "little" blog -- such as that written by esteemed chum Jim Donahue -- is most definitely expired.

Is this, as some folk muse, the lack of an attention span, that people are simply too busy to read more than a few write-bites at a time? I find this very hard to believe.

I myself lament the disappearance of several blogs (you know who you are) who have simply just gone to seed and blown off in the wind. To me, no matter how mundane the content was, it was still a pleasure to be able to drift over to that person's blog and see what had gone on in their world that day -- no matter ONE WHIT whether you personally knew that person or had any involvement in their lives.

It was a daily "doing the rounds," and for a person of routines such as me, it was always a pleasurable routine. Now, I have to confine myself to "News" and "Tech" "blogs" which are impersonal and magazine-like.

Will I quit writing this "blog?" The simple answer is, no, because I don't write it for any other purpose than for the edification of me, and that I was doing it a hell of a lot longer ago than the sorry word "blog" was ever invented.

So yes, let the blog be dead. But whatever you want to call what it is that you've just read -- well, that won't be going away any time soon.