Via Daring Fireball, I want to highlight this post from Andy Baio on why the decline of independent blogging is a sad development:

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

So true. He also writes that “getting discovered, building a readership, and profiting from your work” has become much harder. I still have some hope that developments such as Brave or the soon-to-be-launched Flattr Plus will finally offer some alternative to ad-based monetisation for independent web publishers.