Ah I remember the days of AIM/ICQ/LiveJournal. I actually was connected more to my friends and even made a lot of serendiptious friendships with people halfway around the world.

Now with facebook, I lost touch with people who refuse to be on FB(privacy concerns).

And forget about making friends with strangers on Facebook (gasp!)

Back before Facebook, people were using MySpace, and relatively few of my non-techie friends were using LiveJournal and Xanga to create their own independent blogs, though I imagine today's equivalent is Tumblr. Neither of those are particularly "independent". I don't think a lot of normal people would've gotten into Wordpress or Blogger, though AIM was quite popular at the time.

I was just planning a road trip and googling around for blog posts. Could not find a single blog link on the first 3 pages Google returned. It was just one travel ratingsite/aggregator after another. Sad state of affairs.

Indeed. A lot of research has become impossible. We were in the market for a car. And when you want to Google technical details, you have to wade through pages of useless aggregators.

Slightly offtopic: we found that checking out Geocaches in an area on the Geocaching website is a pretty good way of finding interesting spots/places. Especially highly-rated caches and Earth caches.

And if you would have found a blog the probability would have been high that reviews would have been bought or were at least sprinkled with affiliate links.