The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was

As Jeremy Keith enjoys pointing out, Medium is Ev’s blog and offers RSS feeds and reverse-chronological listings for each guest author.

This time around, the audience seems, for the most part, to genuinely be invested in the blogs themselves. They aren’t being funnelled there by Google or Facebook because it’s strategically convenient for them, for the moment. Substack isn’t the only player in town, so we seem to be avoiding the monoculture pitfall. Blogging for an earned audience ... See more

You might not believe this if you weren’t there, but one of Google’s main problems, once they got going, was that there just wasn’t that much to see on the web.

Google Adwords changed all of that. That, as well as free weblog hosting, fuelled the blogging bubble. You wrote a blog using a weblog system that came with decent SEO baked in (semantic structure and cross-linking, that’s all you needed back then). Most of your traffic came from Google’s search results. All of your revenue came from Google’s Adwor... See more

Weblogs were a strategic lever for Google. Funding them made sense at a time where they needed the web to have more content. When they didn’t need them—when they stopped being a profitable lever—they were discarded. And the ecosystem sunk fast.

Having a great search engine is kind of useless if, for example, somebody types in “how to take better landscape photographs,” and nobody online has an answer.