One of the earliest and best-known original blogs, Jim Romanesko’s “Obscure Store And Reading Room”, is being retired at the end of this week after thirteen years. Romanesko is also giving up his gig blogging for the professional journalism industry website Poynter.org (which *will* remain running). He isn’t giving up blogging, he’s consolidating into a single new site, but the end of Obscure Store is genuinely a milestone in the world of blogging.
I have been a regular reader of the site since the fall of 2000, not long after I launched this website and realized I needed to find some sources if I was going to find things to post with any regularity. From the outset, Romanesko was tuned into enough newspapers and news organizations to have plenty of links to weird news stories, when most of us were still figuring out the whole idea of using the Internet to get and share news. As my blog evolved, I found plenty of other places to find stuff and didn’t very often use his links, but I read it virtually every day. In the olden days, he also had an extremely eclectic blogroll, linking to online zines, other blogs, and unusual websites. A lot of those sites are long since gone and completely forgotten, but it is via Obscure Store that I first came upon MetaFilter, which was also only about a year old in the fall of 2000. Eleven years later, that site remains one of the premiere community sites on the web and is one of my main hangouts online. I believe I also “discovered” FARK through Obscure Store, and the very-much-missed Grow-a-brain.
I’ll be very interested to see how Jim Romanesko’s new site develops, but I will unquestionably miss one of the real legends of the Golden Age of Blogs.
