RIP Blogging (1994 – 2020)

See, I can do clickbait headlines too!

I’ve been working on a personal mission to rebuild a list of active local (extended Kansas City region) bloggers, and bloggers directly and indirectly associated with blogs I followed. The results have been interesting to say the least.

Observationally, the timeline within Wikipedia appears fairly accurate for the local blogosphere (haven’t seen that word in a while). My first personal website which included a web diary of sorts was published around 1999, and this pseudo-anonymous incarnation started in the 2007. My previous tech blog would see potentially hundreds of views per day, but suburbanreject itself has never been nearly as popular with view counts in the tens on a good day. View counts today just remind me that I’m writing for myself.

When GReader died blogs definitely took a hit but many persisted for several years. The real problem? I’ve found few (if any) blogs that started. More unexpected? The slow trickle of blogs into defunctville greatly accelerated around 2020. A shocking number of blogs now exist in the limbo of rare posts that end during COVID.

In any case, here’s all of the blogs I’ve managed to find associated with the old KC Blogger meetup days (or honestly, simply “KC Oriented”) where there’s at least some activity within the past year – note this collection of links does NOT represent any sort of endorsement, these are simply – and only – blogs tangentially associated with KC blogger groups:

I don’t guarantee that this list is complete, and I plan on trying to update it roughly the same time every year. I’ve added all the ol’ KC blogs that still have RSS feeds available to my reader, so if any of them light back up, I’ll be able to see it. There are more feeds in my “Dead?” folder than feeds listed here. There are many more that are simply no longer online. Again, I’m not endorsing or even saying any of these are worth reading – this is SIMPLY a list of still active local adjacent blogs. None of these seemed to be alt-right douchebags, but I didn’t exactly read through every post out there either.

A note to the left leaning bloggers out there: the right wing conservative crowd is currently far, far in the lead on staying old school online. Consider yourself prodded.

I worry that a lot of these active pages are on blogspot. I’m honestly shocked google hasn’t yet pulled that particular plug. Please – consider dropping google in favor of wordpress or blogs. Really, anything that provides an RSS feed is great.

I don’t think Google search directs much traffic anymore to ‘small’ pages. Indeed, my experience in trying to do some work on the techie side of the internet reveals that google page rank is near impossible to achieve anymore. So, local bloggers need to connect and cross link to have any chance of building (or rebuilding) online community. I’m looking for a script to dynamically build a blogroll page – one of the nice features of blogger.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a feed reader – I’m finding Inoreader to be the closest yet to old Google Reader experience. It’s even – in several ways – a bit better.

One thought on “RIP Blogging (1994 – 2020)”

  1. I consume pretty much everything (including Youtube “subscriptions”!) out of my RSS feed, and I have for many, many years now. I like having everything in one place to scroll through. I hate sites that don’t offer RSS options, which is most these days, especially ones that want you to sign up for email updates, ugh. There are RSS scrapers that I use that will look for changes on web pages and provide updates through RSS, but I hate having to manage this hack and wish sites offered this by default. Good on ya for supporting RSS!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *