I started my first blog back in September 2003 using PyBlosxom, set up as an addition to my personal website. It's still there but it doesn't get updated anymore. When I look back at it, it is hard to remember that there was a time on the internet before facebook, linkedin, twitter, reddit and others made the internet "social". When I first started writing my blog the whole concept was new and the key thing that was missing was an audience. My blog was kept as a chronicle of my thoughts and daily activities, with the understanding that it was very unlikely that someone outside my immediate circle of friends and family would ever read it. A bit like talking in the dark.

So what happened to my personal blog? It died as facebook became popular. I joined facebook in 2006, and as people I knew began joining en masse in 2007 it became the place where I chronicled my thoughts and activities, leaving my personal blog obsolescent. My output of posts (as status updates) increased, but their detail decreased. For me a typical blog post would cover a week's worth of activities and be upward of 300 words. A typical facebook update would be posted daily, a passing thought, link to a webpage or photo. It would be "to the point", and never more than 100 words. The main difference to my blog, however, was that there were other people posting, and it was possible to interact with them, through active dialogue in comments, or passive dialogue in liking their updates. facebook and twitter and others made (micro)blogging accessible to everyone.

My days of blogging weren't done though. There are some things that facebook and twitter just aren't a good platforms for. If you want to have a consistent journal on one topic, a blog is still the best option. In May 2011 I started mz12gt.com as a place to chronicle my efforts as I worked on the project of rebuilding my car. Before starting this blog I had already been in the habit of posting comments and updates to a variety of car forums discussing my progress and chatting with other car enthusiasts. But if I wanted to track my progress on a project it was difficult because due to the format of a forum, my progress would be interspersed with other people's comments and questions. I just wanted one piece of the web that was focused solely on my project.

I built mz12gt.com using wordpress and began posting updates as I worked. I had to turn off comments on my blog due to the amount of spam that I was receiving. So again, I was back talking in the dark. Occassionally I would post links to the updates I made to facebook as well as different car forums, in order to share my progress and get advice.

Toward the end of 2011 I got interested in reddit and I started to think a lot about the kind of content I was interested in seeing and reading about on the web. I realised what I was most interested in was the projects that other people were working on; software projects, car projects, house projects, etc. About this time I started to build yojiko.com as a place where people could share blogs about projects they were working on. With the idea of having one blog per project.

So what is the future of blogging? I think that compared to my first blog back in 2003 the future of blogging will be much more visual, with posts mainly centred on photographs, this can already be seen with the popularity of tumblr and instagram. I think blogging will be much more interconnected. If you make a blog post about something, you are potentially going to want to be able to easily update that post everywhere you have a social account. Due to the low overhead of participating, microblogging will be more and more popular as people get use to the idea of sharing small snippets of their lives.  Blogging will become more specific. If you want to blog about one topic or one project you will be able to set up a blog for that purpose alone, and share it with those who are also interested in that topic.

What do you think the future of blogging is?