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Scripting a comeback

The last time there was this much buzz about blogging, George W Bush was still leader of the free world — a world that had not yet started believing in Justin Bieber.

Scripting a comeback


Divyanshu Dutta Roy

 

The last time there was this much buzz about blogging, George W Bush was still leader of the free world — a world that had not yet started believing in Justin Bieber.

With Twitter hitting mainstream around 2008 and officially pronouncing internet attention spans to be 140-characters-long, blogging joined the leagues of dated artefacts like AOL or Myspace, all set to fizzle out and live only through services like Instagram, Pinterest and click-bait sites like BuzzFeed and Cracked. Only the famous, the unfazed and Ariana Huffington pushed through while many of us gave up on it after social conditioning definitively told us: ‘Blogging too was now passé.’

But so it was not to be. At least for very long. The rise of microblogging, photo-blogging and the resilience of platforms like Tumblr made some enterprising developers and designers realise that blogging perhaps wasn’t dying — it was just evolving. Newer tools and differentiated applications could indeed inject quite a bit of energy into the business of blogs and make all of it trendy again.

Enter a batch of new blogging platforms that tackle some of the problems that spurred the lull. Developers understood that the free-for-all and mostly stagnant models of services like Wordpress and Google-backed Blogger had scrubbed off the sheen of blogging — today if you see a Blogger blog, it would not be very different from one you encountered in 2006 — and that was a carnal sin on the World Wide Web. If you have to get users flocking to your site, you have to keep it fast, fluid, functional and flashy — Facebook understood this and thrives on; Myspace didn’t and it went into oblivion.

Reclaiming coolness

“If blogs were bars, Medium is probably the hippest place to be seen at right now,” says The Next Web writer John Russel. The analogy to bars is very apt. To fight a fading level of interest, many of the new generation of blog makers started out by building exclusive or invite — only platforms. Medium and its rival Svbtle are examples of such a strategy. Having an element of exclusivity — at least right in the beginning — meant that such platforms could not only generate a considerable degree of interest and curiosity, but also prevent the sites from becoming, as The New York Times columnist David Carr puts it, ‘a ghetto of internet-oriented early adopters who write odes to coding’.

Additionally, in the world of 2015 blogging, there is no space for the ugly ones. Gone are clunky designs, uninspiring fonts and any resemblances to websites from the Jurassic era. There are only varying interpretations of slick, smooth and sexy. The rise and rise of Apple in the last decade has finally taught developers that a product, even if it is just meant to display text, is nothing without standout design. Even in his death, Steve Jobs would be happy about this; Digital typography has never been more gorgeous.

Add to that images and video displayed in ways you could never even think of before, and you get some of the most elegant and engaging ways to tell stories and share ideas ever.

Serving specialties

But it’s not just about shiny design. Developers understand that it’s time to tweak things under the hood as well. And so almost all of the platforms making waves today having something new going about them. Whether it’s the turn towards reader-first models or new levels of social and collaborative writing or platforms for just a particular kind of content.

Medium, started by Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, offers a feature letting users edit and annotate other people’s work while it obviously integrates well with Twitter. In effect medium is a more of a public magazine than a blogging service. Offering a consistent design, it cuts down on personalisation and thereby offering a greater degree of familiarity to readers browsing for interesting things to read and promising greater reach to writers. Medium, sometimes, pays people to contribute as well and has published the biographer Walter Isaacson, the author Emily Gould, the journalist Ben Smith, the entrepreneur Elon Musk and many, many others in the last year.

While Svbtle, too, has a similar magazine service and its customisation options are also limited when compared to Wordpress or Tumblr, but it offers a superlative kind of minimalism to its users. You post and draft content in a manner that is as distraction-free as possible.

For the more initiated users and those looking for an alternative to the self-hosted Wordpress.org platform, Ghost.org offers a completely open-source and flexible solution and wants to attract those seeking a more purist tool than the more versatile and diversified Wordpress. Silvrback is also a notable mention in this league.

And then there is Postach.io that turns your Evernote notebook into a blog, Posthaven that promises a paid platform that will never shut down and survive the fickleness of here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of internet experiments, Pen.io that offers the shortest possible path to post things, Exposure.co that is a tool to create striking photo narratives and Roon — just a simple, beautiful, distraction free blogging platform.

Fuelling buzz

But all of these platforms, both for the people using them and those making them are, are only as good as the traction they generate. And that they are. If the chatter on the web is any indication, blogging in varying shapes and forms is certainly not ‘so-2008’ anymore — and even hip in some cases.

While the need to tell great stories and share ideas has always been the first case in favour of blogging, no one can deny that coupled with the number and kind of options today, there hasn’t been a better time to start a blog in many years than right now.

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