Blogger Will Most Likely Be The Next Geocities

Finding authentic content on the internet is difficult. It seems everywhere you look it's performative. It doesn't matter if it's YouTube, X, BlueSky, or Bear Blog, there is just a lot of stuff written to show off. The worst offender is Letterboxd, which has the potential to be something truly great but is instead hampered by a useless list function and reviews that are trying too hard to be clever or edgy.

So, when I'm looking for an honest review about a rare 80s slasher movie, I skip Letterboxd and instead I search Sleepaway Camp 3 blogspot, because that is going to give me some random review by a passionate individual who was blogging in 2008 and didn't feel the need to try and be funny.

I find myself on lots of these old Blogger sites these days, because they are great sources to find links to other similar blogs and the amount of effort that was put into those blogs were truly exceptional. Entire communities sprung up, competitions were held, cheesy .jpg awards were given out, and folks wrote, just to write. It didn't matter how niche the topic, the posts were varied and not just the same old tech complaints rehashed over and over like most blogging seems to be today.

What saddens me is how many of these old blogs are abandoned. I'll find a review, click the front page and see it was last updated in 2024 or maybe 2013. Still, there is a wealth of content to consume and if you are looking for a source of information on a specific topic and you don't want the emotionless content of Wikipedia or some YouTuber's "video essay" you really can't beat it.

Blogger is/was a great blogging platform. I used it for many years and if I'm perfectly honest, I thought it had the perfect balance of simple to use, yet easy to customize. I mean, my favorite option that is lacking from so many blogging platform was the ability to swap easily between Compose View and HTML View. With a simple click, you could see the behind the scenes and make changes. It also allowed me to learn how to fix some errors that occurred when copying and pasting or importing from other sources. It was truly neat.

A few years ago, Google did a minor facelift on Blogger, which honestly hurt the platform. In an attempt to become more modern, it lost it's charm a bit. They also did a really poor job on creating responsive themes and as so many people shifted to reading on their phones, it made even people like me think twice about straining their eyes to try and read someones thought on Hardee's Ghostbusters 2 promotional event.

I'm sure all of these blogs have been great for scraping and do serve a purpose, at least for Google, but I feel like Blogger has been on life support for years and it makes me wonder when Google is finally going to pull the plug. Once this happens, the internet is going to lose another archive of a different internet era, one that probably contained more quality information than the Geocities days.

Just this week, I discovered that Angelfire and Tripod were shut down in April. We lost another slew of Web 1.0 websites and as Cinderella sung you don't know what you got till it's gone.

So, next time you are looking for something online, instead of hitting up reddit or social media, try adding blogspot to your search, then spend a few minutes poking around. You never know what you might find.