You know what I miss? The web before Movable Type and WordPress. Or, rather, I miss the period right around when Movable Type was getting popular and WordPress was still b2. It seems like a lot of fires have died out since then.
Why? Because just it's so easy to plonk a WordPress install on a cheap web host or sign up for a free blog. On the one hand, that eases the way for new authors to appear — which is wonderful. But, on the other, it seems that so few are experimenting with the format and the technology anymore. For so many people, Kubrick means blog now.
There was a time when a new blog entry wasn't strictly title-body-author-date and even reverse chronological order was just one of a few ways to do it. Trackback and pingback and publishing referers (sic) were all newly (re)discovered means to bind conversations together.
Tumblelogs seem an exciting change to me, but they've got older roots too. I'm trying to do something a little different (for me) and tumbly here, but of course I don't have time or inclination to go too hog-wild with something experimental. I guess that's really the issue, such as it is.
Eh, I don't know if I have a point in any of this, other than making some old-man noises about the years shortly following the turn of the century. And the only reason it comes to my mind is because I just started building this blog mostly from scratch.
There have been new things in personal publishing — like Twitter and Facebook, for example — and getting ideas out of heads and onto webs has just gotten easier over the years. It's a good thing, but it just seems like something has gone missing.