Picture blogging was a part of the scene from the beginning, but increased steadily as broadband internet access allowed more people to see your photo and comment on it in a timely manner. Even the more eloquent and loquacious bloggers were now including at least one on-topic photo to dress up admittedly dull-looking blocks of text. We saw this and said, "Cool, I can put a picture of Mr. Bananagrabber in my post and it will be rad."
The only difficulty in maintaining a well-written blog was making the time to devote to writing it. (And visiting your friend's blogs, and commenting so that they would continue to do this for you, and thinking of something to make the time to write about, and cleaning up the punctuation, grammar, and spelling lest some jerk make you consider turning off comments and if so then what's the point of doing this?) I have no figures on the popularity of viewing them, but Stream-of-Consciousness blogs have always been a popular style of blog to make. You know them, the rambling, paragraph-long sentences, replete with slang, typos, real errors, and a complete lack of respect for grammar. Like, totes f'reals, inorite? While never my favorite form of expression, this tossing aside of formality does free one up to produce content more easily.
I don't know if there was an increase in SoC blogging to coincide with the coming of age of a generation that has had a red squiggle correcting their spelling for half their lives, but I'm sure it didn't hurt. Around that same time, with higher internet speeds and the boom of video hosting, some of our fellows had a brainstorm. "I could dispense with carefully structuring an articulate narrative by simply speaking into a camera. I can write out what I'm going to say, the gist of it at least, and just have at it. Maybe I'll get views/comments just because of how extremely good looking I am. I wonder if I'll get discovered and put into motion picture shows." Video-blogging became a thing, and with it all hope for civilization was lost. I hope I'm not overstating it, but the word 'vlog' makes my bowels cringe.
Along the way to not getting a call to come out to Hollywood to host their own talk show, some vloggers were running out of ideas to make their videos visually appealing. Good-looking people continued to prosper while providing little other content, but the rest of us were in a quandary. "I've given up learning to juggle, I can't make myself any better looking, I can't afford better clothes and half my vlogs are already with me in my good shirt." Ponder, ponder, ponder. The Perfect Brainstorm occurred and society may never recover. "What if I just do audio recordings, like my very own radio show?" In what seems like a very short time in retrospect, complete nobodies and x-list celebrities that had burned every bridge in every direction were flooding the interweb with their podcasts. Like when my sister and I did shows on her cassette recorder in the '70s only with less preparation. Soon, every open-mic night comedian with six minutes of material was interviewing his mailman and begging Kevin Smith to retweet the link to it. May God have mercy on us all; the people have spoken - and recorded it. Now they want us to listen to their cheez dust-riddled three-day stubble scratch against the microphone as they day drink and wax philosophic about which different celebrities they would, in fact, bang.
