Great Big List of Individual Bloggers

December 04, 2022

I love the internet. I love the possibilities the internet offers to allow people to share things with the world. No matter who you are or what you are passionate about, you can put something out there, and other people in the world can find it.

That is so extremely exciting to me!

I have heard lots of people (mostly on podcasts) talk about how there used to be gatekeepers which would control what the public was allowed to see, hear, and read. Lots of people might have interesting, uncommon ideas to share, but the gatekeepers (such as publishing company executives or broadcast television managers) would choose what would be published, and therefore what was available to the public. It wouldn't matter the value or merit of an idea, if the small number of gatekeepers didn't want it out in the world, it would not get out there.

But now, thanks to the internet, the gatekeepers have lost much of their power, and anyone can share what they want with the world. Information is now far more free to spread. You no longer need to ask anyone's permission to put your ideas out there for others to see.

There are still gatekeepers, of course, and they control access to massive existing audiences. If the manager of a late night talk show chooses to bring on a particular guest, that guest will be exposed to the existing audience of that show. But in the past, those people's next best option would probably have been to perform on a street corner or go door to door with their ideas. But now, they can just publish their stuff online.

Sure, the freedom to share something online doesn't mean anyone else in the world will necessarily see it, but at least it is out there. Anyone COULD find it. The gatekeepers might still be useful for access to an audience, but they are no longer absolutely requisite.

For a small-time, independent creator, you can share stuff online, permission-free, through YouTube, social media, newsletters, podcasts, and there are probably more I'm not thinking of here. But my favorite is BLOGGING.

You can put your ideas out there, and if they resonate with people, they can follow you for more. You can attract an audience of people who are interested in what you share. Rather than trying to appeal to an existing audience, you can build one from the ground up by yourself.

Anyways, I particularly like individuals who run blogs. I think it is so cool that you can find entire sites of things written by a single person. But sometimes those blogs are a little hard to find.

I am much less interested in "blogs" that are actually the product of companies with employees and staff writers. Blogs that are created by teams are just not as fun and spontaneous. They are not as authentic or real. They are just the stuff people write to earn a paycheck and satisfy their boss. But because of the size of their teams and the financial resources they have, they can often out-compete individual bloggers, so that smaller blogs get buried in the search engines.

To help these bloggers be found, and to help you find them (if you are as interested by individual bloggers as I am), I am assembling a list of all of the blogs I can find that are written by individuals. That will be the only criteria I will use when choosing whether to add a site to this list. Otherwise, the sites will be of every kind. They will be on every topic, in every niche, of every size (from a few dozen articles all the way up to hundreds).

I also won't be organizing them in any particular way, so they aren't ranked by how much I like them or anything. I will simply add websites to this list as I find them. As such, this will be a living, frequently updated post.

Please check out the sites below and support these individual bloggers. And if you know of any blogs (including your own!) that would fit here, please let me know of them in the comments and I will get them added.