We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies as "mainstream".
The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.
The previous poster might also consider all the high profile, independent, and influential publications across various subjects that grew out of blogging – e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork, Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing media conglomerates.
> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then.
Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media.
The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.