So, last night I ranted a bit about the idea that “blogging” set back structured content by a decade. It’s a fighty way to put it, but…
… I don’t mean that it’s BAD. Just that it successfully exploded to fill the online publishing ecosystem, crowding out other models.
Its ubiquity and the work to polish the authoring experience meant that lots of stuff got awkwardly jammed into the shape of a blog.
Anyone who’s worked on a comms plan w/a tech-clumsy exec knows that pain. “We should have a BLOG” is just a way of saying, “let’s do stuff.”
Most blogging tools have very specific assumptions — that “content” will be mostly text with light formatting and hyperlinks. Maybe media.
When people try to push beyond that for edge case content, they fall back to HTML (or WYSIWYG-generated HTML) and blop it in the body field.