[shortformblog]

Mashable, notably, is often credited with kicking off the much-derided "pivot to video" trend: https://www.recode.net/2016/4/7/11585950/mashable-fires-news...

But the buyout is sad to me because, if you break it down, it was a really great example of technology blog getting launched by a guy in his bedroom and that guy finding major success with it. There was a time that Mashable was so prominent in the social sphere that a new article of theirs could trend on Twitter just because of the source.

Certainly, the company's never gone away (and it's produced some pretty amazing alums in the journalism world, it should be said—Christina Warren and Alex Fitzpatrick come to mind immediately), but the site's original model—which was effectively a pitch to the masses of "Web 2.0 is awesome, don't you agree?"—had a certain charm to it that got lost when it decided its competition was BuzzFeed.

Certainly Mashable is no longer that kind of blog anymore, but this is sort of the death knell of the big Web 2.0 blog—a list that includes sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Barring The Next Web (which I believe is still owned by its original team), the ones that are still with us (like TechCrunch and now Mashable) are largely conglomerate-owned.

Unfortunate that Cashmore put all that work into the site only to basically break even.

[Carhughes]

Well stated. I miss the old Mashable. Before it tried to compete with BuzzFeed, its readers were manic sharers of content. I wasn't fond of the new video direction it was going, rarely covering good tech news.

[Apocryphon]

How about Pando?

[shortformblog]

It was founded after that era. (Though it's part of that lineage simply because it features a lot of former TechCrunchers.) All the sites I listed launched around 2005-2007, during the Web 2.0 years.

Sites like Pando and The Information really fit in a different category—they're built less around aggregation like Mashable and company were upon launch, and more on original reporting.