Gabe Weatherhead, in an excellent piece on the slow decline of independent online publishing:
Is this it then? Is this the last gasp of independent blogging as everyone moves to micro transactions of half considered thoughts? Will Tweets eat WordPress? It sure seems like the indie blogs are thinned down to a small collection of ideas and opinions. Worse, it feels like the only sites that receive attention are the ones with interstitial ads or pop-up lectures about ad blocking. I know a lot of people are worried about indie blogging because The Deck is going away. But I worry that it’s just the tail end of the sinking ship. Most of the indie blogging spirit feels long lost to me.
Gabe goes on to recommend some of the indie weblogs that he reads. And in that spirit, I thought I’d do the same:
- 512 Pixels by Stephen Hackett
- BirchTree by Matt Birchler
- The Brooks Review by Ben Brooks
- The Newsprint by Joshua Ginter
- No Octothorpe by G. Keenan Schneider
- Pixel Envy by Nick Heer
- Schwarztech by Eric Schwarz
- Steven’s Blog by Steven Aquino
I’m sure there are plenty that I’m leaving out, but this was compiled after a quick glance through my RSS reader.
On a related note, I’ve been making an effort to share links to more indie weblogs lately. Not just because of my own, personal interest in this whole independent online publishing thing, but also because I truly get the most satisfaction from reading those sites. Larger publications have their role and I will continue to read and link to them, but I think Initial Charge would prove more useful if it was helping to surface more obscure writers with interesting ideas.
If you browse through the first few pages of the Linked List, you’ll see that I haven’t exactly been doing a great job at this, there’s a lot of room for improvement. But I hoping to slightly shift my focus towards sharing more ideas rather than quite so many news items. I don’t exactly have any sort of quota, or anything similar, that I’m trying to attain, this is just something I plan to keep in the back of my mind when I’m deciding who and what I link to when publishing.
