{"id":1709,"date":"2021-01-09T19:59:43","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T01:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/?p=1709"},"modified":"2021-09-02T17:10:58","modified_gmt":"2021-09-02T23:10:58","slug":"archeology-of-web-blogs-2005-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/2021\/01\/09\/archeology-of-web-blogs-2005-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Archeology of Personal and Collective Web Blogs (2005-2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blogging is one of the media practices and socio-technical systems that has made the world wide web what it is today. As a practice it has democratized writing, editing, and publishing at a scale that can be compared to the printed press. As a system, it has created a powerful infrastructure for creating, consuming, and distributing content in a networked way that has low barriers of entry and, in most of the cases, it can be used for free. According to a recent report<\/a> (2020) there are more than 500 million blogs on the World Wide Web. That means that almost a third of of all sites on the Web (estimate of 1.7 billion websites in 2020<\/a>) are blogs. <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Although its relevance is not the same it had back in the 1990s and 2000s given the evolution of social media \u2014 particularly the rise of social networking sites and platforms<\/a>, blogging still thrives today as a river of ideas and content in the digital ecosystem. Blogging is digital discourse in one of its more essential forms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keeping a web blog, however, is not easy. Despite having computer and Internet technologies that make the process of writing, editing and publishing straightforward, maintaining a blog, cultivating the habit of posting entries, and generating content online are demanding tasks. Blogging is a media practice that requires lots of labor, persistence, and affect. Evoking the infamous utterance of Truman Capote, we could say that the art of blogging is “a gift and a whip.” In order to master it, one needs lots of practice and commitment, and of course, a blogger needs time, motivation and access to technology and knowledge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the appearance of the first blogging platforms in 1994<\/a>, thousand of blogs have been created using either self-hosted blog software or blog platforms. However, not all of the blogs remain active and are visible. Most of them are forgotten, lost, buried in servers’ hard drives and data centers. Many of them have never been read for more than a dozen of persons. Perhaps because it is “a gift and whip” that is easy to pick up, blogging can also be painlessly abandoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWhere do bloggers blog? Platform transitions within the historical Dutch blogosphere\u201d by Esther Weltevrede and Anne Helmond<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I have certainly stranded several blogs. Before I started the current version VvvaLog you are reading (it is the second iteration), I started many web-logs that did not last more than a year. Back in the 2000s, when the platform Blogger<\/a> was popular around the world, I created several blogs from my home in Colombia. Recently I rediscovered those sites, unearthed them, while trying to find an entry about a Bogotanian Bloomsday I wrote in 2008 as a homage to Joyce’s Ulysses. Although I could not find that post, I found several of my idled blogs. As a reference, and with the purpose of archiving them, I would share links to some of them below :<\/p>\n\n\n\n