Hmmpost

Five years on the web is like 30 human years. Who knows how many sites and services that exist today will be no more in 2013, but my guess would be many. Perhaps most. If you listen to Paul Boutin who is either linkbaiting to the extreme or being brutally honest you shouldn’t even bother starting a blog today.

For those who need another reason to be skeptical of having your blog hosted by any third party — especially a big company like AOL — follow along with the story of AOL Journals which started out in July 2003 as only available to AOL paid subscribers. Some two years later in May 2005 they opened up AOL Journals to non-subscribers. And on October 31, 2008 AOL Journals will be shut down permanently: We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you’ll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or let us handle the migration for you and automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service.

Remember, this is the same AOL who bought Weblogs, Inc and owns the popular gadget blog Engadget. The same AOL Engadget that was named the Official Blog Partner of the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2009. We can blame AOL Journal’s demise on the fact that it wasn’t very good or that they didn’t seem to care about making it different or updating it often enough or insert another excuse. Or we can just face facts: AOL Journals days were numbered from the start because: Third party blog hosting is fundamentally flawed I didn’t always think that way. In fact, I’m part of a group who used a promising third party blog hosting site for a project. What happened to this hosting? No longer offering the service a couple years later. Our blog has continued only because we moved it to our own domain and hosting before the site went down (as AOL is telling its Journal members to do now). I would strong encourage all my blogging friends — whether you are going against Boutin’s advice or have one already cooking — at the very least get on your own domain. Fine if you want to be third party hosted, but at least control the fate of your permalinks. And how about some archive permalink love? It would be nice, just once, to see one of these services promise to leave up their blogging archives and not allow any new posts rather than force all those permalinks to go dead.  Maybe that’s asking too much? As a blogger linking to anything from AOL why should we trust they won’t do this with some other site in the future? The answer is we shouldn’t. We can’t. Those who have blogging since 2003 can now say they outlived AOL’s blog hosting efforts. How long before we see somebody like Six Apart with TypePad meeting a similar fate? And [gasp] what about WordPress.com? A comment thinking 38 years into the future with blogging by Hmm reader April hits the mark: I haven’t the slightest clue what it will be like is say 10 years time let alone 38.

Self-hosting on a unique domain may not guarantee longevity, but it will instantly tell the rest of the aging internet population that you are planning on sticking around longer. Here’s some irony to close on. This Wired article from February 2002 points to a blogger who created a a blog for listing dead weblogs. A noble goal that his comments seem eerily prophetic: "I don’t want to be elitist," Linabury added, "but all these people out there with popular weblogs, they’ve been doing it longer and they stick to their guns."

Kudos for Wired sticking to their guns by keeping the permalink power on, but today the link to Linabury’s blog mentioned in the article is 404. No explanation to what happened to the blog or idea. A Google search for the blog’s title leads to a bunch of porno blogs. Hey, at least we can depend on porn still being here in five years.