It’s been so long since we’ve been this way / The good times we had somehow strayed away

I was reading Huai Bin’s recent post on “old school blogging” and he described it perfectly as being ‘pure streams of consciousness’. That sort of got me thinking how much things have changed in the ten years since I started a blog.

When the blog phenomenon first hit Malaysia, many of us had personal blogs which were not ‘commercial’ in any way. Blogs were mostly used as intended – as web logs – a simple vessel of communicating to an online audience where before no one really had the means to. They were mainly online diaries by early adopters of the internet culture – much were ramblings about daily on-goings – like mine, there were webcams, and it was often a popularity contest amongst same-sex bloggers (pre-blog advertising, mind!). Things were very different back then, people had wishlists, and ‘fans’ would buy things off these lists in appreciation.

Through the years the phenomenon outlived the fascination and patience of many, and only a handful of people I know from the early days of blogging remain. However blogs have evolved into these things where people could make a living off, and thus many old and new blogs became topic-centric and (in my opinion anyway) has lost a lot of the original charm of the old school style of blogging. Even blogging platforms have evolved so much! There was a time I used to hand-code my updates via NotePad (yes I was a PC user yonks ago) and this was before there was any sort of commenting system in place.

I love that these changes have allowed us to focus more on (as HB aptly put it) generating verbal diarrhea. Which is probably exactly what this is!

Have a good weekend! I hope to see some sun at least, these past few days thick fluffy blankets of light grey have been hovering low over Sydney and it has been rather depressing/hard to not think of burrowing under the duvet while at work.

[Post title: Old school lovin'; Chante Moore]

Tagged as: blogs, ramblings, retro internet