How blogging has changed in the last two decades?
Yesterday, I wrote the article 'Make writing your passion and a way to earn money alone', and today, I share with you how was it blogging 19 years back. I started blogging in 2004 because I wanted to become a writer and write something. Blogging was quite new at that time and it was not very popular. I tried blogging because it was quite easy to get published only through it. At that time, there were many platforms like ezarticles.com and others where you can publish your piece of work. Initially, I tried many content publishing websites before starting my first blog at blogger.com. At that time, it was not as easy to publish so freely as we do today. You also needed basic knowledge of HTML to add links or pictures now we can do all this without the knowledge of HTML or other coding. Internet speed was very slow and even posting a single article was a headache sometimes. The features and the options that today's bloggers have were not available to bloggers like me then. Artificial intelligence to enhance the writing and correction of spelling was not readily available. Today, we have many advanced features to help us in writing better content. Below, I am highlighting all the things that were not present in 2004.
1) You need Knowledge of HTML for blogging- In 2004, if you wanted to add links to your post or wanted to add pictures then you needed knowledge of HTML codes to do so. The knowledge of HTML was also required to enhance the blog's appearance and make changes to its design. Today's bloggers are not required to dig into HTML to do these things because things have become automated.
2) Blogging was an unknown word - For most people in India, blogging was not a known word and they were not aware of blogs. Uneven people don't have much knowledge about the websites and internet. If you say to someone then that you do blogging then 99 out 100 people wouldn't have understood what you are talking about. For the next four to five years also the situation remained the same.
3) Slow internet speed - Today we enjoy very high internet speed to do anything online and this is a blessing for all bloggers because they can create a lot of content in minutes. In 2004, the speed of the internet was very slow and it was highly unreliable. For bloggers then the hardest part was to publish their content because they need to wait for the internet to work properly. Sometimes, you need to wait for many hours or a day to publish your content.
4) No automatic correction tools- Today, we can find many automatic tools to correct our writing and spelling accurately. Except for the Microsoft office spell and grammar check, there was no option available and this option was also very basic. Now we can find many automated software and programs, they even provide guidance to writers about what they should write next. Today, the chances of writing wrongly or with wrong spelling are quite low thanks to these software.
5) My Laptop was even slower than today's mobile phone- The laptop I have then had a ram of 256 and a hard disk of 32 GB. Even today most mobile phones have much better configurations. So the computers and laptops of that time were also very slow, therefore, doing work on them was not as easy and fast as it is today.
6) No or very less presence of social media - Social media was almost absent from the scene and there were few options available that they don't have much reach and audience. Today, we get many visitors from social media because they help us to promote our content and circulate it to others.
7) Google was the King - Google was the only option to discover anything on the internet, therefore, it was important that Google should index your content and display it. At that time, you were writing content to please google so that it puts your content on the first page. At that time, Google used to give page rank to sites to decide their importance.
8) US readers were the main audience of blogs- At that time internet has more penetration in the US than in India so you used to get more readers from the US than from India. The content was also not marked or restricted geographically. Like today US internet users see more content that is produced in the US than the content produced in other countries.
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