According to Dave Winer (and he would know) we are coming up on the 10th anniversary of BloggerCon  – the first conference I remember reading about online (in blogposts not surprisingly) and being jealous of. I think it might have been what got my to try blogging for the first time (though it didn’t take until a couple of years later).

I was also recently reading Fred Wilson talking about his decade of blogging. This is the last blog I think I follow from my ‘I wanna work at a startup‘ phase and it survived my various culls because it always stuck to just being a personal blog – just one with a specific purpose.

Recently I have been feeling like blogging is undergoing a bit of a renaissance – the form has changed a little but it seems like there is more great writing going on than in quite some time.

I’m not sure Medium is blogging but it certainly shares some DNA and it seems to have helped spark this resurgence (either as a reaction for it or against it). Something like Svbtle seems to also be a part of this – I’m not sure I agree with all the thinking behind either of them but anything that gets more people writing (and thus reading and debating) online is OK with me. The incredible interest in something like Ghost (raising almost £200k for blog software!) shows that the ‘web of words’ is still something that people are passionate about.

I’ve linked to this amazing piece of writing from Justin Jackson before but it has become a bit of touchpoint for me and how I think about the web. A conference I attended yesterday left me with the strong feeling that people like me and Justin might be seriously out of step with the majority working in the web (well certainly a couple of hundred of those in London yesterday) but I can live with that.

I’ve been wondering whether there is anything I can do to help with this renaissance (other than just keep publishing my own inane babble). Is there a way to encourage others to join in? Convince ‘retired’ bloggers to start up again? Run workshops about digital publishing? My original idea was a conference – get a group of inspiring bloggers to talk about why they blog, what is their process, what are the difficulties. Not people who see it as a way to get a book deal. I don’t know.

I like this idea of a ‘web of words’ – in fact so much I bought the domain. I just don’t quite know what I am going to do with it. Something though. Definitely something 🙂