Some thoughts on ULogs from an oldtimer

Unless you're living under a rock you've probably encountered @surpassinggoogle's ULog project by now. A ULog is basically a post, in any media, about what's going on in your life. I think it's great that's becoming popular again, but it's interesting that we have a new branding campaign around what everyone used to do all the time.

Back when some of you were doing things that would be critical to your future like becoming multi-cellular organisms for the first time, we had what we called online journals, because they were basically just like written journals only on the internet. It was all about taking what you would normally have written down about your day to keep your personal historical record, and sharing it with everybody who cared to read it.

Everybody wasn't a whole lot of people, though, because the population on the web was about as big as Steemit is now. So our writing was public, but it wasn't too public. And it was pretty much just writing; Youtube hadn't come along yet, and maybe you could put an image or two in but you knew your parents would want to read it and they didn't have broadband. Not only was it writing, but we wrote it natively in HTML, uphill both ways, because we didn't have nifty content management services yet.

At the same time other people were keeping weblogs, which were collections of links to things they had found other people doing on the web, and their reactions to them. Before too long people figured out they could build software to do this easier, brand and monetize them, and make a bunch of money. Blogger was the most popular early platform for this, and they took "weblog" and chopped bits off of it to give us the word "blog." People moved both sorts of journals onto their platform, and eventually "blog" came to mean whatever you might care to write about and publish yourself for everyone to read.

But then a few years later the short-post services came along, and it turned out most of what people wanted to write about could fit into Twitter or Facebook. Rather than big daily collections of thoughts or links, we just threw them out there individually whenever we were thinking about them. "Blogs" became more serious as real-world publishing companies adopted them, especially newspapers, to refer to reporting that was more timely than they could manage in print.

People started thinking of long-form posting as something that had to be about significant things, not just what they were doing at the moment. The personal updates become more things for Facebook. Even Twitter, once famous for posting pictures of your lunch, has been losing them as it becomes the political center of the universe. I have a friend who's trying to get the #bringbacksandwichtwitter tag going there, but I think that's a bit hopeless.

Here on Steem, we talk about Quality Content a lot, and I think about it a lot. It's literally the first question Minnowbooster asks us when we're evaluating posters for their whitelist: "Does this user post quality content?" So I've had to figure out what that means to me. The basic rule I've come up with is: have you expressed to me why what you're posting about is meaningful to you? This gets down to the core of communication, which is presumably what we're here for.

So I'm pretty happy with ULogs, because they are all about that. They bring back the idea that it's worth knowing about how other people's lives are going, and connecting with them, on a little bit more-organized basis than it's possible to do through Facebook. I liked that when we were doing it decades ago, and I like that we've started doing it again now.

This is communication, and if it's a little weird that @surpassinggoogle had to brand it to get more people doing it, it's still pretty great.