there’s no denying that the legacy we’re talking about is a powerful one that will cast a long shadow.
The cultural reign of the blog, roughly 2000-20 or so, coincided with the second full chapter of the internet.
Far more than aggregators, photo-sharing services, or social feeds, the blog was “Web 2.0.” Blogs didn’t produce the most Web 2.0 bytes, but they produced the most significant ones.
Perhaps it’s my blogocentric conceit, but it feels like the active lifespan of ribbonfarm in particular, 2007-24, coincides rather neatly with a very well-defined chapter in the grand narrative of civilization itself, with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the 2024 US Presidential election serving as neat bookends.
Whatever the outcome of the election, when this blog officially retires on November 13, we’ll be in some sort of new era.
An era blogs helped usher in, but won’t be a part of.
Conceit or not, it’s hard for me to see the story of ribbonfarm as merely my story, or even merely the marginal story of the few dozens of contributors, or of the little subculture of a few hundreds that coalesced around it for the better part of a decade.
The story of ribbonfarm has been, in a small one-of-a-million threads way, the story of civilization itself, through the 2007-24 period.
