The Idea Dude

CONNECTING THE DOTS ONE AT A TIME

Saturday, March 10, 2012

My Goodbye to TheGoodBlogs

We finally shut TheGoodBlogs website down today. It's been a really interesting 6 years. We started coding in July 2006. Back then, Twitter had just launched with a horrendous interface with Google Adsense ads. Facebook was still focused on college and school kids. Reddit was relatively unknown and MySpace was king of the hill as was Wordpress and Typepad. The words Groupon, Pinterest, Tumblr didn't exist. There were no iPhones and Android had just been acquired by Google.

Back in 2006, blogging was the de facto method for self-expression. Companies began using it as a medium to reach their users. It was then the stream of web consciousness. We were part of that, like MyBlogLog and other widgets, fought for a piece of real-estate on your blog. We were all about promoting blogs and bloggers and connecting each other in the blogosphere. I think we did that incredibly well, our widget was seen millions of times and the phrase, 'I found you through TheGoodBlogs' was often found in blog comments. I laughed with the Moms and their amazing blogs and learned much from the marketing and business blogs. The art blogs showed me all about human creativity. Alas, altruism is not a business model but we kept the site alive, probably longer than we should have.

Today, blogging continues to be a resource for sharing but it has to compete with social networks like Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. Even for geeks, while there are many blogs describing coding techniques for iPhones etc, much of that information is now unstructured, dynamic and found on sites like StackOverflow.

The web has changed. Blogging is still important but perhaps a little less so than it used to be. Today, the sheer volume of information that flows through the web means that we can only swallow smaller pieces, packaged as Facebook comments, 140 character Tweets. Today, we live in a world of soundbites.

TheGoodBlogs website is no longer as relevant in the digital world today and hence we have taken the painful and personal decision to shut it down. TheGoodBlogs, the company and the founders (Tealeaf and TheIdeaDude) are very much alive. As the digital world around us changes, we must reinvent ourselves before we too become irrelevant.

As they say in the classics, TheGoodBlogs is dead, long live TheGoodBlogs.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is there any chance your midi to ocarina score converter could be reborn somewhere else? Or would it just be wishful thinking on my part. Hehe.

If so, that'd be awesome! Otherwise, all I can say is thanks for the effort put into it, I'm sure many others also appreciated and loved your work for it! :D

10:04 PM  
Blogger The Idea Dude said...

The code is pretty isolated, so we may be able to move it to another spot... stay tuned

12:22 PM  
Blogger The Idea Dude said...

We moved the code to http://www.ideasunplugged.com/thegoodblogs

Enjoy!

2:26 PM  

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