Happy ‘International Blog Remembrance Day’, a New, Made-Up Holiday ⇥ motherboard.vice.com

Jason Koebler, Vice:

The general decline of the blog—not the news blog, but the BLOG BLOG—is a bummer. No offense to the many cool and worthwhile bloggers still posting to WordPress, Tumblr, XANGA(?), and good ol’-fashioned websites, but for the most part, the best blogs of our generation are being wasted in tweetstorms, Facebook rants, and reddit comments. I am not just making this up: There are entire conferences dedicated to preserving Web 1.0, back before our computers had become Facebook and Twitter machines.

On a related note, Laura Hazard Owen interviewed Jason Kottke for Nieman Lab:

[…] The way I’ve been thinking about it lately is that I am like a vaudevillian. I’m the last guy dancing on the stage, by myself, and everyone else has moved on to movies and television. The Awl and The Hairpin have folded. Gawker’s gone, though it would probably still be around if it hadn’t gotten sued out of existence.

On the other hand, blogging is kind of everywhere. Everyone who’s updating their Facebook pages and tweeting and posting on Instagram and Pinterest is performing a bloggish act.

Unlike a blog, though, the format of these posts often cannot be controlled by the author, and the author often doesn’t actually own what they’ve just published. The loss of the importance of actual blogs is a real sucker punch for the web.