I started blogging more than 10 years ago, and even then I felt I was late to the game. I'd recently stopped working for Amazon.co.uk and a book review website seemed the best way to keep my contact book live, and keep the review copies coming in. Back then, I felt I was joining a real community of dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles. And, moreover, one I believed had radical possibilities: if the book review pages hadn't quite shrunk to the pinched state we find them in today, they were hardly in rude and rigorous health. Not only that, but when serious books were reviewed they all seemed to me to be of a type I call Establishment Literary Fiction, the kind of literary fiction that wins prizes, and which mostly leaves me cold. I wanted to review books I felt weren't being given the credit or publicity they deserved. Writers like Gabriel Josipovici, Gert Hofmann, Enrique Vila-Matas, Peter Handke and Rosalind Belben.

Many great blogs focus on genre fiction: the love of vampire epics or raunchy romances, SF or historical fiction. My focus was on "serious literature" – the scare quotes are in place because what is contested as such was also part of the reason to get involved in the fun and the fray of blogging.

My hope at the time was that countless blogs would emerge that would prove an untested thesis to which I'd long cleaved: that the attempt by the mainstream media to contain the intelligence of the average reader by trivialising their seriousness could be resisted, and that blogging would prove that readers had far more sophisticated tastes than the broadsheets presume.

Blogging, I hoped, would prove to be the start of a renaissance in long form critical writing … but even committed bloggers like myself found it hard to knock out long, incisive reviews on a daily – or even weekly – basis. Understandably, we often filled our blogs with linkbait. If a nice review or post went up on Monday, perhaps Tuesday and Wednesday would simply be a comment directing our readers to something good elsewhere in the blogosphere. Actually, this felt good. This was OK. This was community-building. Bloggers linked to other blogs and praised other bloggers; the MSM (mainstream media) could be ignored.

Then along came Twitter. And, fairly quickly, that blog article linking to another blogger's excellent article on X, Y or Proust, never came to be written. A link was just tweeted out. And the tweet joined countless others in a maelstrom of posts, very, very many of which pointed readers back to articles in the MSM. Again, for a while, I was optimistic. If the linkbait went from blogs, that surely only left the good stuff. But the linkbait proved to be part of the lifeblood, and blogs started to wither on the vine – mine too for a while.

When I started blogging, I felt part of a community that linked and supported and shared, and which, for a moment, seemed like it was really going to jolt the complacency of the MSM. Whilst the number of bloggers has continued to increase, my sense as a blogger is that the renaissance in the literary critical essay that I hoped to see just hasn't happened. (In other disciplines the situation is better: the vibrant online philosophy community shows blogs at their best.)

There is a wonderful amount of enthusiasm and warmth and energy online on an ever-growing number of great book blogs, but despite the sterling work of some, an army of amateur literary essayists has never arisen. And that rather saddens me.

Of the bloggers who do really stand out, my top five are:

Stephen Mitchelmore (This Space): Steve understands the form, using his blog to write occasional literary essays of real merit and penetrating insight.

David Winters (Why Not Burn Books?): Winters isn't a blogger but a literary-philosophical critic whose name has turned up on many of the best literary websites and blogs over the last few years.

3:AM magazine: Like any magazine it is patchy but, at its best, it is punchy, intelligent and confrontational, justifying its tagline, "Whatever it is we're against it".

Flowerville: What is a blog for, what does a good one look like, or do? The truth is we don't know, but if it is simply an inspiring place that provokes thought and seems to be written by a fellow seeker, then Flowerville gets my vote.

Time's Flow Stemmed: TFS's About section reads: "To quote Samuel Beckett's letter to Thomas MacGreevy (25 March 1936), 'I have been reading wildly all over the place. Time's Flow Stemmed is a notebook of my wild readings.'"

• Mark Thwaite is the founder of ReadySteadyBook. He will be speaking at the TLC Writing in A Digital Age conference which runs from June 13-15 at the Free Word Centre, London. For more information, go to the conference website.

We have five tickets to the conference available at a 25% discount on a first-book-first-served basis. Click here and quote Promo code: Partner25.