On the ends and potential beginnings of blogging eras

Baltimore Woods, 30 March 2024. Olympus OM-1n, OM Zuiko 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5, Kodak Pro Image 100

It’s a topic I’ve brought up before: There was once a great number of bicycle blogs that concentrated on everyday, urban cycling. When I really got into blogging at the end of 2010 (this blog had been launched five years before, but up until then I posted sporadically and haphazardly), I was motivated by this movement. It was fun time, I got to meet a lot of interesting folks, some whom became friends. But it became quickly apparent that the wave had already crested, and within a few years the number of blogs that posted regularly dwindled. By about 2015 there was only a hardy handful left, many of which posted sporadically and haphazardly.

Yet I still kept plugging away, despite the audience seeming to disappear, as this blog became a journal of my life, something I could look back on. I say “seeming to disappear” because my stats still look pretty good, and I get several “SEO service” spam emails a week. But people don’t engage with my blog in the way they used to–it used to be all comments, but now it’s mostly “likes”.

Not all is doom and gloom. I mentioned a few months back that Lorenza of Naturally Cycling Manchester came back after a ten-year absence. And Lorenza is not alone. Ailbíona McLochlainn/Albina, the voice behind Lovely Bicycle, one of the top blogs of that everyday bicycle blog moment, announced her return on her new blog. She talks about the fading of the particular movement I mentioned above:

I can remember the exact moment I realised that blogging, in the form we had come to know it, was about to become extinct.

At the time, I was the author of a rather eclectic bicycle-themed blog. Cycling was having a ‘moment,’ and there were many blogs of this genre in circulation. Chic Cyclist preceded mine by about a year…I looked forward to reading Chic Cyclist as one of my favorite pastimes – following with interest for years, then feeling an undercurrent of sadness as I sensed her enthusiasm wane after some time. Life had moved on for the author, with a new child and a move abroad. Posts became less frequent, more brief.

But despite having sensed this trajectory, the final entry still came as a blow. Not only because it was the end of Chic Cyclist (the post did not say so, but somehow I knew), but because it heralded, I felt, a more pervasive change in the blogosphere…

It was 2012, and there were signs of what was coming if one knew where to look. The rising popularity of instagram due to its sheer ease of use compared to the clunky blogging platforms, was one red flag I suppose. But the bigger indicator, looking back, was the increasingly frequent audience requests for blog authors to start audio podcasts and YouTube channels, as those platforms began to gain in traction.

What the audience really wanted, was not just content to read, to be informed and inspired by. They wanted more of the author as a person. And the audio-visual platforms were designed for this very purpose.

She had many of the same feelings I had, like blogs that petered out because a project was done or the author lost interest and inspiration and felt they had nothing more to say. But she also had some observations I didn’t think too much about. Sure, I did notice how Instagram became “the thing” about that time, how many of the blogs I followed abdicated for a branch of the Metaverse. I wasn’t too thrilled about it, because Instagram is even more about the likes than WordPress. But I could see why some people moved over so eagerly: it’s easier, and if your blog was more a collection of photos with some words strung together, well, Instagram just makes more sense. And there were definitely a good number of “low effort” blogs that people did to get themselves out there when blogging was a big deal, so when the big deal moved to Instagram, there was no love lost.

And I can see Albina’s/Ailbíona’s¹ hesitation to give more of herself to the world. When she started the blog, she carefully cropped out her head in any photos. She soon stopped doing that but did hide behind a degree of anonymity. Sure, if you were in the Boston bike blog scene ² or once were supposed to draw something for her ³ you would know her real identity. There was a good degree of anonymous to semi-anonymous bike blogging in that era, where the blogger would hide behind a nom de plume.⁴ Of course, the air of mystery only increased people’s interest in her. But Ailbíona only revealed her real identity publicly a few years ago. So you can see why she’d not be down for YouTube.

My misgivings about YouTube have less to do about how much you give yourself to the platform if you create a channel, but because of what it’s taken away from blogging. For example, I used to like reading Path Less Pedaled’s posts. The blog hasn’t been updated in almost two years, and pretty much any post from the past five or so years is simply a repost of a YouTube video. Russ has pivoted to video because that’s where “engagement” is. If you are trying to make something of a living off this stuff, that’s where you have to be. And that leads to the constant churning out of “content” to stay “relevant” and get sponsors, Patrons, and products to review, plus the inevitable “hot takes” and clickbait to get engagement. I’m not knocking what Russ (and Laura!) are doing, as it’s nice to have an influencer who’s in their 40s and a person of color who approaches things from the alt-cycling vs. racing world. But I don’t like how YouTube demands so much of your attention. I don’t want to watch a ten-minute video every week, but I’ll read blog posts several times a week. The same goes for podcasts, which I rarely listen to. My rule of thumb with podcasts is that a 90 minute podcast should be 60, and a 60 minute one 30.

And I also find it a bit ironic that Ailbíona talks negatively about influencers. I get the ambivalence, but back in the day, we all considered her an influencer in the blogging world. She would get sent a lot of products to review, had sponsors, and even collaborated with some bike brands, something that irked a certain demographic of white, male, middle-aged cyclists: Why is she getting the opportunity to work with X brand when she’s only been biking for a few years? Well, it’s because she offered a different perspective on things than the status quo, and that’s why brands were eager to get her input. Now, I don’t think she aimed to be an “influencer”. She was honest in her opinions of products and would give critiques when she felt it was warranted. But that was the blogging world, where nuance can exist. Now we have influencers who will flaunt any product or brand who will give them stuff (and sometimes the ones that don’t.)

But the most curious thing about all this doom and gloom about blogging is that it mostly applies to the bicycle blogging world. I’ve gotten heavily into film cameras and fountain pens over the past five years. While there’s plenty of YouTubers and Instagrammers in those two realms, blogging remains healthy. I get several posts a day in my feed about old film cameras and new fountain pens. And ironically Ailbíona is part of that film photography blog world too: She’s contributed several posts to the great site 35mmc (as do I.) I have vague ideas why bike blogging withered (like the slow decline of practical bikes) but no conclusive answers. I hope that we can somehow propagate the energy from other blogging communities back into bike blogs. I’ll keep on doing my thing from my corner of the world, and look forward to Ailbíona and others returning.

And this may be a bit selfish, but: If you would like the bike blogs that we have to stick around and more blogs come about, engage with them. Likes are not enough, comments mean a lot more. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing even more bloggers to platforms where engagement is easier.

Like my stuff? Go to my Ko-fi page to buy me a coffee!

1. Pronounced “Al-BEE-nah”, not like how we’d pronounce it here in Portland. ↩︎
2. There was a great number of Boston bike bloggers then. I’m guessing it’s because of the abundance of academia in Beantown, not because of good bike facilities (which there wasn’t.) Perhaps that’s the trick: shittier bike infrastructure leads to better bike blogging, whereas here in Portland with its good (by North America in 2010 standards) we just rode around naked instead. ↩︎
3. As I was supposed to around the year 2012, when I got a phone call from her and learned her real name. ↩︎
4. It could get a little annoying at times, especially when the anonymous bloggers assigned a fake name to their partner. The most cloying one to me was “The Cellist”. ↩︎