I’ve built this blog and in so doing, I’ve added to the 600 million blogs in the world there are today. Roughly four-and-a-half billion people read them which sounds like a big responsibility until you publish one of the 7.5 million articles produced every day. And then watch your analytics dashboard show a clear trend of zeroes.

I could be ideological. But to me, there is a lot of merit in what used to fit the description of a blog post. Not the greatest writing, not a sublime literary outpouring. But raw and honest. My contention is, that it still matters. But first, let’s take a walk through how we got to where we are.

Blogging started out nice and simple. In 1992, Sir Tim Berners-Lee kept a raw list charting the progress of the World Wide Web project. By 1994, a Swarthmore undergraduate named Justin Hall published on Links.net. A running log of personal hyperlinks and domestic trivia.

What we had at that point was an enthusiast pointing at weirdness across the wire and shouting, “Look at this”. And that is still the best definition of blogging, give or take all the complaining about search algorithms.

Proper naming arrived in late 1997 when Jorn Barger decided on “weblog” to describe his digital wanderings. Then, two years later, Peter Merholz snapped the word into “we blog” in his sidebar. Next, Evan Williams turned the noun into a verb by launching Blogger, and suddenly anyone with a 56k dial-up modem could broadcast their opinions to the planet without a clue what a server was.

Ah, but then came the collapse. Between 2001 and 2003, the medium discovered politics, personal ramblings, and advertising. WordPress appeared in 2003 and consumed roughly forty percent of the civilised internet. Every office worker, theorist, and amateur photographer suddenly possessed an international sound board. Broadsheet columnists began muttering about “citizen journalism” with completely straight faces.

True disaster arrived with Google AdSense. Suddenly a writer could earn three-tenths of a penny whenever an innocent reader clicked a banner for affordable aluminium siding while attempting to read a 3,000-word dissertation on the correct temperature for brewing English tea. The universe had engineered a mad scheme to turn minor domestic gripes into rent money.

Today, the average article or blog post is hammered out in collaboration with a large language model that has digested every word ever committed to silicon and yet still cannot grasp irony. The corporate marketing departments call this “content creation.” It’s definitely not the creation of content anyone wants to read. It is simply someone talking on a page. If only for our collective sanity, we ought to call it what it was before the consultants arrived: blogging.