Twelve years ago today, AOL opened its Journals service. Around it grew up a community of bloggers, which came to call themselves J-land. They were mainly from the UK and the US, sharing life's joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats. Pictures, graphics and creations passed back and forth. Quite a few of our number have passed away over the year, and are remembered in a dedicated blog,
Silent Keyboards
5 years and 40 days after opening Journals, AOL closed them all down. We barely had four weeks to migrate elsewhere, and some bloggers lost their blogs altogether as the message of the shutdown did not reach them. Nonetheless, many resumed on Blogger, LiveJournal and Wordpress. Blogging appears to have fallen out of fashion, and we are now mostly on Facebook and Twitter.
