Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 Revolution

I got on the web in 1995, just two years after the world was introduced to it. Back then, it was a read-only affair. If you wanted to publish something to the web, you really had to be a programmer.

Then, about the turn of the century, the web started to democratize, meaning it became easier to “write” to the web. Someone invented the concept of “blogs,” which was a portmanteau of “web” and “log.” The idea was rock simple: you created a “log” of reverse chronological entries and published to the “web.”

Since there was now an accepted format to it, software began to coalesce around it. I started using Movable Type back in 2001 or so. WordPress was the next big thing in that space, and there were many others.

When blogging became a thing – when we began to frame that idea in our heads – the web suddenly became a read/write situation. It became just as easy to publish as it was to consume, and this gave birth to an amazing period in the web’s development from the early 2000s to about 2011 or 2012, when blogs ruled the content space. The “blogosphere” was this amorphous, distributed construct of digital properties, the people who published to them, the people who commented on them, and a bunch of tools and infrastructure that knitted them all together: RSS, OPML, trackbacks, pingbacks, comments, Gravatars, etc.

This became known as “Web 2.0.”

I was there at this moment, right in the middle of it all. I started blogging on a site called Gadgetopia back in 2003. It was personal, but it eventually evolved to become the de facto technical blog of the company I co-founded in 2005: Blend Interactive.

Richard MacManus was in the blogosphere too. He started “Read/WriteWeb” (RWW) back then and ran it until he sold to SAY Media in 2011.

To be clear, MacManus and I were on very different levels. Gadgetopia was relatively popular, and I did monetize it a bit. I think it made about $1,000/month at one point through a combination of Google Adsense and the FM Publishing ad network.

RWW was blogopshere royalty. They had readership in the hundreds of thousands of people, published deep original content, had a staff of editors, and really helped push the web through this period. I was a huge fan of the site, followed it closely, and I often referred to a seminal article on publishing that appeared there in 2008 in a popular conference talk I gave for many years.

Bubble Blog is the story of RWW, and – through that lens – it becomes the story of that entire period in the evolution of the web.

And I say “period” because it inevitably ended. As MacManus makes clear, social media eventually smothered the blogosphere.

I remember this time well. The harbinger of it was when blog comments dropped off.

You see, the comments of blogs were really the first social networks. Every blog had “regulars” – people who followed a blog and commented a lot. I still have acquaintances from those days, several of which I’ve met in real life and who have become friends. Additionally, there was a commenting infrastructure that attempted to thread comments together into a larger social construct – things like trackbacks and such (which sort of live on as web mentions, I guess).

But then, seemingly overnight, people stopped commenting. Well, they did comment, but they just did it over on Twitter. That service started in 2007 and quickly became the default place for discussion. As an author, you eventually learned to announce new posts on Twitter, because that’s where people would discuss them and re-tweet them (whether you liked it or not). In the particular industry I was in, Twitter became the biggest driver of traffic.

I think this had something to do with a tie to identity. Comments on blogs were mostly unauthenticated – you were only identified by what you typed into the “name” and “email” boxes, and there was no way to verify that. But on Twitter, commenters effectively became publishers. Their comments were part of their social media account, and they were building their own audiences in that sense.

Twitter had other effects:

• It prompted a coalescing/leveling of publications that the environment never quite recovered from. Most readers started to depend on Twitter to find new blog posts, so they stopped following blogs (via RSS), and thus, the larger blogs started to crowd out the smaller ones, and they achieved a gravitational pull that sucked all the traffic out of the lower levels of the space.

• Eventually, blog authors themselves got on Twitter, and his affected the content we published. Pre-Twitter, a lot of blog posts were tweets by another name. We would just be sharing a link (example) with very little other commentary, so sometimes just be sharing a couple sentences of thought (example). When Twitter became available, this content dispersed. It became weirdly harder to justify writing a “full” post for it.

So, the blogosphere was a defined period. It started, lived, and eventually died out. Social media changed everything and shifted the web into something new. It never got a catchy name like “Web 2.0,” but it was a different creature entirely.

Sure, we still write and publish blog posts, but back then, the blogs were the network. The global network of blogs were a self-sustaining matrix of content. Now, social media is where the relational and conversational world is, and websites are just content. Back then, it was different. Blogs, the networks they formed, and social construct of the authors, readers, and commenters – all that was the echo chamber itself. There was no “other place.”

What MacManus has managed to put into words in Bubble Blog is the story of one publication’s ascent, reign, and descent(-ish) during that time period. He tells a very detailed history of RWW – its ups, downs, victories, defeats, and challenges during this decade.

What I loved about the book is the… quotidian parts of it. All throughout, MacManus accurately projects an image of endearing cluelessness. He’s honest – he doesn’t portray himself as a savvy media tycoon. He has to deal with a lot of incredibly low-level problems, without any history or precedent of how to solve them.

He writes of his experience as it was: he was a random guy from New Zealand who stumbled into something much bigger than he expected, succeeded at it, but never really felt like he knew what he was doing. I get the feeling that when he finally sold RWW, he walked away thinking he still hadn’t solved the puzzle.

And that’s the truth of that time period: we were all just figuring it out as we went along. We had no strategy. We were just thrilled that we suddenly had a voice and that people would listen to us. We had grand plans that we tried to implement with stars in our eyes, but we were faking it – we were neophytes, babes in the woods, hoping that someday we’d figure it out and arrive at the Promised Land.

MacManus sold RWW for a decent sum in 2011. He doesn’t say what he was ultimately paid for it, but he discussed some offered figures earlier in the book, and I gather it was somewhere in the seven figures. Good for him. He actually achieved what we were all hoping for. He was the hometown boy that made the Oscar acceptance speech.

I eventually shut down Gadgetopia. As I got older and more established, I became less enamored with being associated with a catchy nickname (the domains and Twitter handle are for sale; I’ve owned them for almost 30 years). The moment that sealed it was when someone introduced me as “Mr. Gadgetopia” at a conference, without using my actual name.

I moved a selection of posts to this site back in 2019 or so, and I archived the rest (almost 7,000 of them). I’ve only added new posts a few times, and only when it was incidental to having some “extra” content lying around for some reason.

But there’s no doubt that Gadgetopia was absolutely crucial in my own professional development. It was a huge factor in the growth of Blend – I lost track how many customer relationships and how much revenue could be traced back to things I wrote on Gadgetopia. The site put me on the map in my own industry space, eventually leading to me writing a seminal book on CMS. And it gave me a platform to evangelize Episerver (now Optimizely) – a (then) little-known Swedish CMS, of which Blend became the first North American partner back in 2008 and helped usher onto this continent (it’s now a multi-billion dollar company).

And, well, here we are.

Publishing on the web has gotten less defined, and there’s a lot we could say about how the resulting level of discourse has nose-dived. But, those arguments are common and getting a little tired. The web has faded into the background of our lives, and the possibility of casting your voice into the void is now simply the default right of almost every human on Earth. It’s no longer novel. We’re no longer breaking any new ground in that sense.

I absolutely loved Bubble Blog, because it was the look back I had been waiting for about the concepts, the time period, and the social environment when I became what I am today. This book legitimizes that time period. It puts bookends around it, so we can look back on it and talk about it as what it was: a swirling milieu of things that came together magically.

I probably owe my entire career to the blogosphere and that decade. My thanks to Richard MacManus for – perhaps accidentally – writing the best extant history of it.

Postscript

After I finished this book, I took some action. I can’t say everything here was solely prompted by MacManus, but the book did ignite some fires that had been smoldering for a while.

First, I withdrew from social media. I deleted my Facebook account after 18 years on the platform. I deleted Instagram and Threads too, though I spent little time there. I eventually even deleted BlueSky (which was quite new for me).

In terms of social media, I currently exist only on Mastodon (which is purely technical) and LinkedIn (which is purely professional). I no longer have a “personal” social media presence. (Someday, I’ll write about the underlying reasons and after-effects of this, but I’m still mentally sorting through it and will be for months.)

Second, I started blogging again. Here you go:

An American in Europe

For an American, I’ve been to Europe a lot. Since my first trip to Stockholm in 2010, I’ve probably been in Europe …25 times? I went six times in 2023 alone (two of those trips were one week apart). I’ve been to a majority of the major cities. I think Madrid is the largest city I haven’t visited…

That’s an honest-to-God blog post that has nothing to do with any ulterior purpose or initiative. It’s just a thought I had which was longer than a social media post normally allows for. That means it’s something I wouldn’t have published before, because I couldn’t really fit it into a social media persona and publishing format.

Also, it was something I wanted to “own.” I didn’t want to delegate its existence to a platform owned by someone else. I wanted that thought to exist solely under the authority of me.

And as it turns out, I have a blog. So, by God, I’m gonna start using it again.

Long live the blogosphere.

Book Info