Bloggers of yesteryear

I was e-chatting to a blogger the other day, as you do, and the subject of the North East of England came up. “Wife in the North country,” I said. “Wife in the North?” came the reply. “I don’t know that one. Have to look it up.”

I have known for a long time that I am an Old Blogger, but it was with that comment that I realized that a whole generation, maybe two or three, of bloggers have emerged since mine.

I started blogging in May 2007, and it was very different then. That was in the days before the explosion. There were no groups to join, and you found new blogs to read via the blogrolls of your favourite blogs, or by following up comments. So it was important to be on blogrolls, and to keep your own one up to date. You had to make your comments sympathetic, witty, insightful, perky, intriguing, inviting (no pressure, then) as they were your opening gambit in the conversation, and there really wasn’t any other route.

No-one in the UK was making any money from their mummy blog, and there was much more talk of blogging as a guilty pleasure. People would regularly say "I should be doing the ironing/playing with my children/walking the dog/working on my new world peace project, but here I am blogging again." It was a little like being in a club, and confessing to a naughty secret.

Twitter didn't exist (yes, really). You didn't know who your followers were, and feed-readers were for the advanced. Anyone who had a Sitemeter button on their blog was pretty sophisticated. Uploading a picture was a skill that new bloggers sought help for, and were congratulated on when they’d mastered it. If we’d known vlogging was only a couple of years away, we could have called putting a picture up, “plogging”.

Now I don’t want to be accused of being cliquey, or competitive, so I don’t want anyone to feel excluded here. But I got a little nostalgic, and I started thinking back to the old days. Any other Old Bloggers out there, I thought I'd invite you to accompany me down Blogging Memory Lane. (And I'm not really worried about being cliquey here, because I don't think most people would feel hard done by, for not being part of a group of shamelessly backward-looking old fogeys, in today's forward-looking, punchy, dynamic, multi-media blogging world.) Trouble is, as I wrote this, it stopped being a trip down Memory Lane, and became a visit to Bloggers' Graveyard. That's the thing with blogging. Most of us are doing it for a reason, and that often also means we are doing it for a season. A lot of people whom I was reading two years ago are no longer blogging. Some people announce they're leaving (and some then in fact come back), but most just post less and less frequently, until the last post is up there for months on end.

Wife in the North was, of course, the big name at that time, but do you also remember Strife in the North? That was a spoof blog written by Rilly Super. On occasion, Wife in the North would write a post, and within a day, Rilly Super would have written on the same subject. One or two people suspected Wifey of also being Rilly, but I didn't buy that theory. One blog is time-consuming enough...

There were other Northumbrian bloggers who I enjoyed: Mutterings and Meanderings, and then a couple who have disappeared completely from the blogosphere: Mutterings from the Mill, and Over 60 Now, whose blogs don't even turn up on google now.

Then there was Stay at Home Dad. In those days, a daddy blogger was a very rare creature, almost mythical in status, and because he wrote so movingly and sensitively about his daughter, lots of us had a virtual crush on him. Oh go on. Admit it.

I miss Rotten Correspondent, with her tales of life as a nurse in a busy ER. I was actually in her town a while back, and we could have met up, but I didn’t discover till after the event that that was where she lived. What a waste. And what about Blooming Marvelous? Remember her? It was through her blog that I learned that marvellous is spelt differently in American and British English. Who knew? I thought she’d disappeared for good, but she left a comment recently, so she must still be reading occasionally.

Ha, and what about Omega Mum? I used to laugh out loud at her descriptions of school assemblies. Never understood her blog title though: 3 kids no job, since she did have a job. Maybe the blog came first, and the job came later. Then there was Beta Mum, who went all off-shore on us and moved to Jersey.

It’s a pity I didn’t keep a copy of my blogrolls (is there some way of accessing old versions?) It would have been interesting, and I know I’ve missed a stack of excellent Old Bloggers. I hope you’ve enjoyed the trip with me, though, and please feel free to add any other lost old favourites in the comments. There ought to be some way we could have a get together. Class of 2007. Perhaps there's a niche for a website here: Bloggers Reunited, which would put our anonymous virtual identities virtually back in touch with other anonymous virtual identities.