Taste and Discipline
I spent way too much time reading German fashion blogs in 2009. Most of them were people in their bedrooms photographing whatever they’d bought from H&M, bad lighting, worse commentary. Then you’d find someone like Lisa who actually knew how to work a camera and had opinions about clothes that weren’t just here’s what I wore.
The difference wasn’t effort—the bad blogs had plenty of effort. It was precision and taste, which you can’t really fake.
The whole German blogging thing was splitting then. On one side, people who took it seriously—WordPress on their own domain, consistent voice, actual discipline. On the other side, millions of people dabbling, posting once a week or not at all, treating blogs like they would treat Facebook five years later. Nobody was choosing blogging over social media out of principle. They were choosing it because their mom wasn’t on blogs yet.
The ones with personal voices did fine. Diaries, life writing, whatever you want to call it—if you were interesting enough and honest enough and could write, people read you. Clara, Sara, people like that. Everyone else was fishing in empty water.
Some blogs were just curation. Pull the best design stuff from the internet, post it constantly, build an audience of people who wanted a filtered version of their feed. Hypebeast, Beautiful Decay. It’s not a creative practice—it’s just taste applied at scale. But it worked because most people want someone else to do the work of filtering.
Music blogging made less and less sense. YouTube existed. Spotify and streaming were coming. What was the point of blogging about music if you couldn’t make the song play? The only blogs that lasted added something—interviews, writing about why something mattered, exclusive tracks. Just sharing new music was drowning.
Tech blogs somehow worked. People got obsessed with gadgets, with specifications, with the next phone or laptop. Engadget, Mashable—they built real publications because their beat was always moving and people needed information. There was no algorithm yet. Discovery happened through blogs.
The weird thing was the niche blogs. One person obsessed with sneakers. Another person obsessed with a specific music genre. Another tracking some corner of design that nobody else was paying attention to. They became authorities in tiny kingdoms. Outside their kingdom, they didn’t matter at all. But inside it, they were essential.
What I kept noticing was that success came from two places: being genuinely interesting as a person, or having such a specific obsession that the obsession becomes the voice. Everyone else quit after a few months or never started. The platforms didn’t matter. WordPress, Tumblr, whatever. What mattered was showing up and having something to say.
I don’t think most people understood that at the time. They thought fame or money or sex appeal would come from blogging if they just got good enough. Maybe it did for some people. But the ones who lasted—who were still blogging two, three, five years later—they weren’t doing it for any of that. They were doing it because they wanted to write, or they wanted to share, or they just liked having a place on the internet that was theirs.