There’s some pieces mak­ing the round to the effect that some of the old school NYC blog­gers are com­ing back to blog­ging. From Fred Wil­son, The Per­son­al Blog:

There is some­thing about the per­son­al blog, your​name​.com, where you con­trol every­thing and get to do what­ev­er the hell pleas­es you. There is some­thing about link­ing to one of those blogs and then say­ing some­thing. It’s like hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion in pub­lic with each oth­er. This is how blog­ging was in the ear­ly days. And this is how blog­ging is today, if you want it to be.

Wil­son cites Lockard Steele in Back to the Blog:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stu­pid fun link­ing to each other’s blog posts for no oth­er rea­son than that they exist­ed and that it amused us great­ly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

Anoth­er one of his cita­tions was Eliz­a­beth Spiers, who fol­lowed up with a post Any­thing I Care About:

I don’t have to write as nar­row­ly as I do when I pub­lish in a reg­u­lar media out­let. The upside of that for me is that I don’t feel com­pelled to stick to a par­tic­u­lar top­ic. I can write about, as Fred put it, “any­thing I care about.”

One of my first thoughts is how annoy­ing­ly insid­er these posts feel. One of the qual­i­ties about the cur­rent inter­net is that our fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms are so sophis­ti­cat­ed and trans­par­ent that we don’t always see how self-selected a sliv­er of social media we’re see­ing. Face­book and its mys­te­ri­ous algo­rithms are the exam­ple we all like to com­plain about. But Twit­ter is a dif­fer­ent beast depend­ing on who you fol­low and Google search­es use hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent sig­nals to tai­lor results. Just because your cohort all stopped per­son­al blog­ging in exchange for pro­fes­sion­al­ized blogs ten years ago doesn’t mean it’s a uni­ver­sal phenomenon.

When­ev­er some­one says they’re start­ing (or restart­ing) a blog I like to wait a few months before cel­e­brat­ing, as there’s a big dif­fer­ence between intent and actu­al writ­ing. But I like the idea that per­son­al blogs might be mak­ing a come­back among some of what we used to call the digerati.

But let’s not get too snob­by about domains: how are Face­book posts not a per­son­al blog? Is it just a mat­ter of URLs? I have Face­book friends who put care into their online per­sona. Peo­ple use Face­book and Tum­blr and Insta­gram part­ly because they come with built-in audi­ences — but also because their crack­er­jack engi­neers have tak­en away the fric­tion of blog­ging. When Wil­son decid­ed to exper­i­ment with this nouveau-blogging, he pho­to­blogged a trip to his Word­Press site. What hap­pened? The pho­tos were all over­sized. One of the com­menters asked Wil­son “isn’t this a bit sim­i­lar to what you’re already post­ing on Tum­blr and Foursquare?” Well, yeah.

Any­way, all this is to say that I’ve blogged a lot more since I decid­ed to make my Tum­blr my per­son­al blog. I’ve got the near-frictionless post­ing that keeps my pho­to­blog­ging look­ing good but I’ve main­tain the con­trolled URL of mar​tinkel​ley​.com to future proof against new tech­no­log­i­cal plat­forms. But is it just the URL that makes it a per­son­al blog?