I’ve been telling myself for years that I used to run a link blog on Fridays and that the habit died when link sharing moved onto timelines. I went and looked. That’s not what happened, and the real version is more interesting.
There were nine of them, between the 28th of March and the 6th of June 2003. Ten weeks. Nine posts, for something I’ve been calling an era.
What it actually was
Not links. A prompt.
Every Friday a site called Friday Five posted five questions, and thousands of unrelated blogs answered them on their own sites on the same day. Alongside it, Photo Friday set a single word as a photographic challenge, and you posted your response to that word. Water. Packaging. Glass. That was the whole mechanism.
Reading the one from April 2003 now is odd. The questions that week were about celebrity, and my answers include the fact that I used to work for Danny La Rue, that I’d like to be rich but absolutely not famous, and a small amount of information about my privacy that I’d probably not volunteer today. None of that was written because I wanted to record it. It exists because somebody I have never met asked five questions on a Friday.
That’s the part worth noticing. The format produced a kind of writing that nobody sets out to do. Left to my own devices I write about what I have opinions about. A prompt from a stranger gets you the other material, the stuff that turns out twenty years later to be the only surviving record of something.
I checked the links
Each of those nine posts ends with the same two credits, which is what you did then. So I put all of them through a resolver this week, and the results are a neat summary of what happens to the web.
The original Photo Friday address, at a subdomain of somebody’s personal domain, no longer exists at the DNS level. Not a 404. There’s nothing there to return one.
Friday Five still resolves. The domain is registered, it redirects politely to its secure version, and then it serves you an entirely empty response. Somebody is still paying for that name and there’s nothing behind it, which is a more melancholy outcome than simply going away.
And Photo Friday, which moved to its own domain at some point, is still running. Twenty three years later, the weekly photo challenge is there, working, answering with a page. I didn’t expect that.
The fourth address in those posts is on my own site, a page I had at /photofriday/ for my entries. That one is a 404. So of the four links in the series, the only one that still does its job belongs to somebody else, and the broken one is mine.
What replaced it, and why it’s worse
The prompt didn’t die. It moved.
Every platform now runs the same mechanic continuously. A hashtag, a trend, a reply-with-yours thread, a question posted by an account that exists to ask questions. The instinct is identical and the participation is enormously higher. What changed is where the answers land.
In 2003 the prompt was hosted in one place and the answers were hosted in a thousand places, each on its own domain, each the property of whoever wrote it. Now the prompt and the answers are hosted in the same place, and it’s not your place. The aggregate is the valuable thing, and the aggregate belongs to the company.
Which means the modern version produces the same writing and then keeps it. My daft answers about celebrities in 2003 are still here because there was nowhere else for them to be.
Bringing it back
So, Fridays again. Some rules, mostly to stop me from quietly abandoning this in ten weeks like last time.
- Fridays. If it misses Friday it goes out Saturday, and if it misses Saturday it’s skipped rather than delayed.
- Three to six things. No quality bar beyond whether I’d send it to a friend.
- One line each, two at most. If something needs a paragraph then it wants its own post.
- Nothing whose only address is a post on a platform. If it doesn’t have a URL of its own it doesn’t count.
- Credit where I found it. “Via” was everywhere on the old web and it has more or less been abolished.
The one thing I can’t rebuild is the bit that made it work. A shared prompt needs other people answering it the same day, and there’s no Friday Five any more to organise that. Photo Friday is still going, so there’s at least one place still doing this properly.
If you have something odd, well made and unmonetised, the comments are open. That’s roughly how this used to work.
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