Bring Back the Personal Blog
September 19th, 2008By: Sean Percival
I can’t help but feel personal blogging is dying right now. It of course all started with personal blogging but naturally times have changed. Now many great personal bloggers make their living doing just that, blogging for dollars. I can’t knock that, we all need to pay the bills somehow. However at the same time lets keep the personal blog alive. Its there, away from the advertisements and embargoes that your message or story can best be expressed.
Better yet, lets see more personal bloggers with a huge presence out there, pageviews galore. Competition drives the space pretty well on the commercial side, how about the personal side? Here is how a few personal tech bloggers match up.
Louis Gray, you’re going down!
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On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 4 people and commented on 4 times 
September 19th, 2008 at 5:23 am
[...] Bring Back the Personal Blog :: Sean Percival - with the increasing number of blogs looking to be vehicles for citizen journalism of one sort or another Sean calls for a return of the true personal blogs. [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I would like to see more successful individual bloggers. In the cases above, you have some good examples of individual bloggers who made the leap to big-name sites with MG Siegler going to VentureBeat, and Duncan switching from TechCrunch to the Inquisitr. (I’d argue that’s where more attention would lie)
Also - despite month to month bumps, what do you think happened in March for me to catapult the statistics? I think I know.
September 20th, 2008 at 2:24 am
Looks like Compete is *really* low in its estimations of my traffic, but good to see I’m on the rise!
According to Google Analytics, I’m at 22K uniques for the past month, and that’s with 10 days of no reporting when I changed the site design and forgot the Google code. Most days in the past two weeks I average 1000-1500 uniques. I used to be steady at 30K uniques a month, but now it’s closer to 38K, methinks. Even better I’m pulling in a whopping $75 a month. Hello retirement!
Kidding and self-pimpage aside, I agree totally. More personal bloggers. Or wait… We have tons of personal bloggers. Personal bloggers became hard to find b/c there are now sooooooo many personal bloggers that you can’t find the good ones for all the not so good ones. Too much noise to signal. Yeah, I think that’s it.
September 20th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Personal blogging has to die to make room for the next big thing. Also we are nearing the end of the Web 2.0 bubble which means everything should start looking really bleak soon. But, never fear. A new age of technology will rise from the ashes of Web 2. Hopefully with a more creative name than 3.0 :). It is the down times that provide the gaps so that historians (like me) can tell one era from the next.
September 21st, 2008 at 8:34 am
The stats graph is not found. I think that blogging isnt dying. I think that the problem come from the business blogging that can compete and destruct genuine blogs.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:41 am
Its about human tendency to be aligned with the majority, to be seen as normal yet exceed them in some ways. Blogging nowadays is saddled with so much expectations that one is overwhelmed with expectations even before starting to write a post.
Let us stop this and reward individuals for the actual content they post. Let Google not be the arbiter of what is worth discovering and spending time on.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
What’s with this thing ‘personal blogging’? Personal? A blog is simply a tool can be used to publish, in a certain way and form, information. Any information. About anything. By anyone. Its who is doing it that is personal - not what they are doing. Seeking to conflate a certain type of information or content (personal) with a specific publishing tool or channel (blog) - well, that just so much an old-fashioned web1.0 way of looking at things. Everything in 2.0 is personal - even when its not personal - that’s the whole point.