Years ago, I gave a TEDx talk called On the Internet / In Real Life. It was about social media, although what interested me wasn't the platforms themselves. I was fascinated by the way they were changing our relationship with information and with one another. I spoke about the responsibility we have as users to choose what we consume instead of accepting whatever appears in front of us, about understanding that every platform creates its own version of reality, and about the idea of the prosumer: the moment when we stopped simply consuming media and became producers ourselves.
Looking back, it's striking how familiar those questions still feel. The technology has changed dramatically. Algorithms have become astonishingly precise, artificial intelligence can generate photographs of people who never existed, and entire conversations now unfold between humans and machines. What hasn't changed is the need to decide where we place our attention. Every day we choose what deserves our time, what we believe, what we ignore and what we carry with us once we close the screen. Lately, while rereading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, I found myself thinking about that conversation again.
Woolf argued that, for a woman to write, she needed money and a room of her own. Not because walls magically produce better ideas, but because every writer needs a place where thoughts can exist before they're interrupted by the world. I don't think she could have imagined blogs, search engines or social media, but I suspect she would have recognised the feeling.
Every time I discover that someone still keeps a blog, I become immediately curious. Some of my favourite bloggers are from Argentina. Others live in Berlin, London or New York. Some have become creators with audiences that reach millions of people every month. Others still write quietly for a few hundred readers, publishing posts about the novel on their bedside table, the café they found during the weekend, the flowers growing on their balcony or whatever happened on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. I visit all of them with exactly the same curiosity.
There's something deeply personal about reading a blog. Every website slowly develops its own atmosphere. After a while, you begin to recognise the books someone keeps returning to, the music they're listening to, the cities they love, the photographs they choose to publish and the way they observe the world. You don't simply read isolated articles. You become familiar with a person's way of thinking. I still love that. Perhaps because I grew up reading blogs. Perhaps because I studied journalism. Or perhaps because I've always been more interested in people than in content.
I work in marketing, and I genuinely enjoy social media. It's one of the most fascinating communication tools we've ever created. I've built businesses through it, helped brands grow, discovered writers, artists and photographers I probably would never have encountered otherwise. Social media has introduced me to people who later became friends. But my relationship with writing has always happened somewhere else.
When I sit down to write an article, I don't think about trends or formats. I don't wonder whether an idea would perform better as a Reel or a carousel. The article simply becomes an excuse to spend an afternoon thinking about something that caught my attention. Sometimes it's Walter Benjamin. Sometimes Truman Capote. Sometimes it's Croatia, Patagonia, branding, music or a conversation I had over coffee. The writing itself is enough.
I started my first blog in 2010 and the second one in 2012, because I wanted somewhere to write about concerts, books, interviews and everything that fascinated me. I shared every article on Facebook because that's simply what we all did back then. Eventually more than a million people visited it. Years later, I collaborated with brands and discovered that something I had started for fun could also become professionally valuable. None of those things explain why I kept writing. Writing did.
Looking back, I realise that what I miss most about the early internet isn't necessarily the design or the platforms. It's the feeling that people were making things because they genuinely wanted to make them. They weren't thinking about engagement, optimisation or personal branding. They were simply following their curiosity and leaving traces of it online. That spirit still exists. You just have to know where to look.
Owning a website has always made sense to me. Platforms evolve, algorithms change and formats disappear. A blog stays where you left it, quietly becoming an archive of your interests, your work, your photographs and your writing. Sometimes I look at articles I published fifteen years ago and smile. Sometimes I disagree with them. Sometimes I wonder who that younger version of myself was. They're all still there. I like that.
There's also something reassuring about knowing that people arrive intentionally. Nobody accidentally spends ten minutes reading an essay on someone else's website. They decide to visit. They decide to stay. They decide that another person's thoughts are worth part of their afternoon. That feels increasingly rare. Maybe that's why I still get excited every time someone tells me they have a blog. It feels a little like being invited into their favourite room.
Virginia Woolf imagined a room where women could think and write without constantly asking permission to exist. Sixteen years after publishing my first article, I still find myself returning to my own small corner of the internet for exactly the same reason. Not because I have to. Simply because I still enjoy being there.
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