The Indomitable Tipa recently announced that she will be closing down her “The Daily Blogroll” because she feels that it’s not providing the level of service to the community that she’d hoped it would (my takeaway). I really liked the “The Daily Blogroll” because it was kind of a half-way point between an RSS feed and a direct market aimed at readers.

Content delivery and content discovery are two ends of the same road. As content creators — yes, bloggers are content creators, too — we need to find a worthwhile way to notify potential readers that we have published something new. Those of us who are religious about it might go to great lengths to make this happen; I don’t know what those lengths are because I’m more agnostic and write these posts for personal edification and if people read them and like them, that’s a bonus. I suspect a lot of people ’round these parts fall more in line with my ethos than with the “hustle culture” we see in the video realm where a person needs to have not just a YouTube or Twitch presence, but both, and needs to be making Shorts, Reels, and TikTok versions as well just to stay above water.

Content consumers need to find a way to find content that interests them. The humble RSS feed is widely considered the go-to as it allows readers to curate a pile of sources from authors who usually resonate with them. Finding those authors, though, usually relies on the efforts made by the authors themselves, be they through social media or whatnot.

The “The Daily Blogroll” service was a cool way to see a selection of blogs for the day without having to really curate a feed. Users could visit the ‘roll and get an AI summarized list of 12 posts from bloggers who had been registered in the app’s database. I liked this because it summarized each post without giving away the punchline, but gave enough info that I felt like I could make an informed decision whether to read the post or not.

Thinking about the “The Daily Blogroll”, I was struck by the fact that bloggers don’t usually congregate. At best, we will boost one another’s social adverts, and link to one another’s post if our own post happens to reference someone else’s. But that’s about it. We’ve lost the once-storied “web ring”, although word on the street is that many people are trying to bring that particular brand of sexy back, but there are limits to reach and inclusion which I suppose are inherent in any type of broadcast platform.

What I don’t think people have done — and I might be wrong here — is to band together under a single banner. Why have bloggers not just thrown their hat into a communal ring? If we look at professional news and similar zine sites we see all kinds of authors writing their own posts about their own topics, but all available at a single site. Visitors can browse by topic, can use a single comment sign-on, and get a veritable firehose of content in their feeds if they still want to go that route.

This is the point where folks might be itching to tell me why, exactly, so let me save you at least some of the electrons. Obviously there’s the whole “control” thing. Our sites aren’t just shingles we hang on the Information Superhighway; they’re part of our identifiers. Yes, even you, blogger-who-believes-otherwise. A lot of people whom I know, I know because we grew up in the blogging scene together, because we were all blogging (about similar topics so I won’t discount those connections as well), and I will always consider many people as “bloggers” even if they’re writing as much as they used to. Becoming part of a collective means that we’d no longer have complete control over the look and feel of the site, and we certainly wouldn’t get the warm-and-fuzzies that a name drop of “[Author-Name] from [Site-Name]” gives when another bloggers cites our posts. Another reason is…well…also control. Who would be in control of this operation? The road is littered with projects that died because the principal(s) behind them decided they didn’t want to do it anymore, and wouldn’t turn over the reins to someone else, or no one else wanted to step up and take over, or worse: someone went on a power-trip and destroyed the whole project in a childish tantrum. There are other reasons, of course, like who would get to participate, and how would that be determined, and what topics would be OK and which wouldn’t, and there will inevitably be some kind of behind-the-scenes drama that would cause issues. A communal site would also put everyone’s content into one bucket, making it difficult for any one participant to back-up their own content or take it with them should they want to divest and set up their own shop in the end.

So yes, I know why it hasn’t happened, but as we get older, a lot of us are blogging less, and are a bit more flexible about what we’re talking about. Many of the Old Guard aren’t banging out posts about a single game every day anymore; we’re talking about cozy and casual games, throwing a few paragraphs out As The Spirit Moves Us, or are diversifying our subjects like never before. A lot of us are constantly contemplating whether we should stay in the game or just fade out gracefully. Maybe communal blogging is an optional “next step” for an elder community, especially for those who don’t feel like they’re posting enough to justify an entire site, but still want the option to drop a post here and there. The concerns still remain, though, and I think they’d need to be ironed out either by democratic process or by sensible fiat. Again, this is just a train of thought, and maybe some wishful thinking at this (Blaugust) time of season.