Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

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Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

20 November 2025

When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful.

In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people prepared to offer definitions of meaningful, and how to write accordingly. It was natural. The web was once awash with all sorts of blogs. Likewise people who wanted to show others how to blog “successfully”.

Again, the definition of successful resided with the individual, but it was obvious this involved monetary return for some people. And why not. If you’re going to invest time and energy in creating a resource that is useful to other people, why shouldn’t you earn money, make a living even, from it?

One of these people blogging about blogging was Melbourne based Australian writer and author Darren Rowse, who launched his blogging resource Problogger in 2004. Without going into detail, because you can look it up for yourself, Rowse, as one of the earlier bloggers about blogging, did, and still does presumably, rather well for himself.

Rowse’s writing, and that of his contributors, attracted numerous readers keen to learn what they could about blogging, and the potential to make money from it.

Problogger is what’s called a niche blog. As a blog about blogging, it has a reasonably singular focus. Some people considered this niche principle to be a core tenet of blogging. There was this idea, in the earlier days of blogging, which possibly still persists, that blogs would do better if they had a speciality. Not only were search engines said to be in favour the approach, but the author of a speciality, or niche blog, would generally be considered to be an expert, of some sort, in their field.

A master of one trade, rather than the proverbial jack of all trades.

Regardless, the world was once full of blogs on every topic imaginable. It was a great time to be alive. If you wanted to learn about something in particular, there was a blog for you. Some publications featured quality content, others required a little fact checking, while some were definitely to be taken with a pinch of salt.

But niche blogging was never a format that suited everyone. There are people who did, still do, well, writing about a range, sometimes a wide range, of topics. Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality. Here, the publication itself is the speciality. To repeat what I wrote in the first sentence of this article: the rules of blogging are few.

But the facets of blogging covered at Problogger, and numerous other similar websites, usually only applied to blogs of a commercial nature. That’s not to say one or two personal bloggers might have looked at the tips posted there for increasing their audience, or improving their writing though. But in my view, personal bloggers were not, are not, part of Problogger’s target audience.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote about Problogger, let alone visited the website, maybe fifteen plus years, but a recent mention of it by Kev Quick, via ldstephens, caught my eye. But I don’t believe Rowse is being critical, in any way, of personal bloggers because they do not adhere to a niche or speciality publishing format. That’s not what Problogger, or Rowse, is about.

But this started me thinking, and writing another of my long posts.

In an age where social media, and influencers, have usurped blogs and their A-List authors, in the jostle for supremacy, it has to be wondered what role websites like Problogger still have. Only a handful of blogs generate liveable incomes today. Despite the doom and gloom though, the form has not completely died off. A backlash against social media, and a growing IndieWeb/SmallWeb community, has precipitated a revival in personal websites.

This is a largely non-commercial movement. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with personal websites. Many of us started out with them in the early days of the web. But the web was not only intended for personal journals. It was a vehicle for sharing all manner of information. The web could also empower individuals, and partnerships, to not only set up shop online, be that blogs, or quite literally shops, but potentially make a living at the same time.

But with the revival of personal blogs well underway, I think it’s time to bring niche blogs back into the fold. I’m talking about well written, quality, topic focused resources. This is material fast vanishing from the web, leaving ever diminishing options to source useful and accurate information. What are the alternatives? The misinformation morass that is social media? Being served AI generated summaries in response to search engine queries? A web choke full of AI slop?

At the same time, I’m not advocating for a return of niche blogs plastered with adverts, and popup boxes urging visitors to subscribe to say a newsletter, before they’ve even had a chance to blink at what they came to read.

I’m talking about work produced by independent writers, with an interest in their subject matter, who are not backed by large media organisations, or private equity. This is bringing back reliable sources of information, that also recompenses the content writers in some way. Hopefully we’ve learned a few lessons about monetisation since the earlier wave of niche blogging. We know it is possible to generate revenue without compromising the reader experience.

A resurgence in personal blogging is the first step in rebuilding a vibrant, thriving, web, or if you like, blogosphere. Now the focus needs to be on restoring the flow of accessible and trusted information.

Curiosity-driven blogging: try doing that on TikTok or Instagram

12 November 2025

Simon Willison:

My piece this morning about the Marimo acquisition is an example of a variant of a TIL – I didn’t know much about CoreWeave, the acquiring company, so I poked around to answer my own questions and then wrote up what I learned as a short post. Curiosity-driven blogging if you like.

This is how I might refer to the longer articles I write. When I’m able to write them, that is. So often I intend to make but a brief mention of a given topic, but find my curiosity piqued, bit by bit, with each sentence I type. I soon find myself learning a whole lot more about the subject at hand than I thought I would, and realise I’ve expended some quantity of the midnight oil in doing so.

Is there a medium better than blogging for curiosity driven blogging?

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blogs, self publishing, writing

Blogs, a lot of them, millions of them, as agents for change

23 October 2025

Elizabeth Spiers, writing at Talking Points Memo:

The lesson for me, from the early blogosphere, is that quality of speech matters, too. There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.

As Spiers says, it might be possible to manipulate the CEOs of large media companies, but doing the same to a million independent publishers, may not be so easy.

Every blog has a yelling dumbass reader

16 October 2025

Hamilton Nolan writing at How Things Work:

If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else.

Nolan is not writing about blogging per se, but his words will be all too familiar to anyone who’s been publishing online for any amount of time.

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blogs, self publishing

Threads to allow extra long posts, does this really mean blogging is back?

9 September 2025

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Meta is adding a new feature to let you add a bunch of extra text to Threads posts — no screenshots of text blocks required. Starting today, Meta is rolling out a tool that lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to Threads posts, giving you a way to build upon the 500-character text limit already available when making a post.

The feature will certainly appeal to people looking for a platform that allows them to publish blog-like posts with ease.

What really caught my eye though was the “blogging is back” byline appended to the Verge article. I’m not sure who would have written that, Peters, or an editor. Is blogging really back? Did blogging ever really go away? Is the Verge trying to suggest this new Threads feature will bring about a blogging resurgence? Surely the Verge, and their writers, are aware of Indie/Small/Open web?

Blogging has been back for sometime, if it even went away.

Blog publishing platform TypePad closing 30 September 2025

29 August 2025

TypePad is/was up there with the likes of WordPress.com and Blogger.com. The publishing platform stopped accepting new members about five years ago, so some warning, I guess, of what’s just happened was there. Still the four to five weeks notice they’ve given doesn’t seem like much, especially for long term, or prolific writers, who will have large databases they need to download.

And then find somewhere new to migrate to. If you’re a displaced TypePad writer though, do consider obtaining your own domain name, and a self-hosted solution to publish future work to.

TypePad was originally created by California based software development company Six Apart. In 2011 the company was sold to Infocom, a Tokyo, Japan, based IT operation.

Six Apart also created the once popular LiveJournal (since sold to SUP Media, a Russian company), and Movable Type, a weblog publishing system developed in 2001, and still going strong.

Another remnant of the early web going, along with dial-up internet access, which AOL, one of the last major providers of the service, said they would be shutting down, also at the end of September.

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blogs, self publishing

Reasons to leave Substack, how to leave Substack

5 August 2025

The question is — before giving any thought to some of the objectionable content they host — what are you doing there in the first place? Why would you allow your brand to be assimilated by another?

American economist Paul Krugman’s decision to set up shop on Substack, after he stopped writing for The New York Times, plain baffles me. With a profile as impressive as his, Krugman could just as easily started publishing from his own website, with a ready made audience.

He didn’t need to go to a third party publishing platform. Certainly Substack publishes writer’s posts as email newsletters, but if someone wants to syndicate their work by newsletter, there are other options. Writers can earn money through Substack, some do very well apparently, but high profile writers have a number of ways of generating revenue through their own, self-hosted, websites.

You Should Probably Leave Substack goes through some of the options available to writers who want to leave Substack (and preferably publish from their own website).

The near demise, and comeback, of Medium, an online publishing platform

17 July 2025

Tony Stubblebine, CEO of online publishing platform Medium, writing at Medium:

I’m gonna write the wonky post of Medium’s turnaround. I’m not sure if a company is allowed to be this blunt about how bad things were. But it’s very much of the Medium ethos that if something interesting happened to you, then you should write it up and share it. So hopefully this will give some inside info about what happens to a startup in distress, and one way to approach a financial, brand, product, and community turnaround.

Like many online writers I signed up for Medium — which is similar to Substack — a couple of years after its 2012 founding. A few people I knew were publishing there, and I was curious to see what it was about. I’m yet to post anything though.

But Stubblebine’s account of Medium’s ups and downs is, at times, astonishing. Particularly the amounts of money, both as investments, and in debt, that are involved. Of course, there will be plenty of people who’ll call those sums a pittance, but speaking as a boot-strapping independent online publisher, they are incredible.

The lure of publishing your work on a platform such as Medium, lies in the opportunity to be paid for it. And no doubt, some writers posting on Medium do well.

For my part, the prospect of publishing there (or on similar platforms) is tempting, but doing so just isn’t in my DNA. I’ve never liked the idea of assimilating my brand into someone else’s, something I’ve said before. Anything you do on a third-party publishing platform is doable on your own website/blog, if you are prepared to persevere.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t ever post there, and for someone like me, a platform such as Medium might be comparable to a social media channel.

Indie Web, Small Web, and now Sovereign Web?

11 June 2025

Aevisia writing at the Sovereign Web:

The truth is, I’ve had some difficult experiences with parts of those communities. At times, I’ve felt excluded or harshly judged simply for choosing a different path or expressing my creativity in ways that some consider unconventional or even controversial.

I linked to Aevisia’s Small Web Movement project in March. If Indie Web and Small Web are spaces that belong to everyone, I don’t see how one person can tell another they’re not welcome. Someone told me a while back I wasn’t doing Indie Web right. In their opinion. I gave their email due consideration, then flicked it away.

But I’ve had comments like that all the way through the time I’ve had disassociated. I’ve not been doing something or other right, according to someone or other. But the answer there, I find, is to keep on doing what you’re doing.

Unless say plagiarism, something deeply inappropriate, or the illegal, is involved, no one can tell you, the creator, that you’re doing something wrong and don’t belong. All criticism of that nature means is someone doesn’t like what you do, not that it’s wrong.

No doubt I’ve been excluded in some corners too, but that’s the way things go. And no doubt I’ve excluded others in some fashion, at some time, but I’ve seldom been directly critical of what anyone has been doing.

If starting another movement, Sovereign Web, is the solution, then I don’t have a problem with that. But everyone’s paths, and their expressions of creativity, are different. I think the response is not to worry about the opinions of other people, and stay on your course.

Claude fails to explain the abrupt disappearance of their blog

10 June 2025

AI assistant Claude must have had one of the shortest blogging stints ever seen in the blogosphere. Just days after announcing Claude’s debut as a blogger — albeit with “human oversight” — Anthropic, Claude’s creator, almost immediately shuttered the publication. The URL for the blog presently redirects to Anthropic’s main website.

We can only speculate as to why the plug was pulled on the venture, but I was looking forward to reading some of Claude’s output. This preferably with a minimum of human oversight, as I was curious to see how well an AI assistant could write by themselves. Anthropic’s move could possibly be seen to suggest they weren’t too confident in Claude’s blogging abilities though.

It’s good news for human self-publishers: we live to blog for another day. Or two.

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