Slashdot Mirror
Blog reading up 58% in U.S.
mshiltonj writes "Americans are becoming avid blog readers, with 32 million getting hooked in 2004, according to new research, showing that blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year."
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Figures that most are teens too, like me. They are obsessed with each others lives. Oh well, what can I say? I guess it is interesting and others are technical and informative!
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
"Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."
Blogs, journals, etc. have replaced mailing lists for my friends (aged 26-35) as the way of keeping up to date with each other and arranging social events. Sure, we still email for 1-1 conversation, but for broadcast blogs just seem more efficient.
My Journal
I wonder what's the case about -writing- blogs and how many blogs out there aren't read even once.
Anyway, blogs definitely -should- have some kind of mark to help filter them off from Google. Sometimes they badly ruin search results.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
That's because America is a cult of personality. People love following other people and drooling all over them and knowing everything they do, including when they take a shit or all of the drama about how their doctor is switching them from xanax to klonopin and how they got wasted the night before with some dude they met at a club that had some percosets to share. Honestly, who cares?
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And nothing has changed, except that we have renamed "home pages" to "blogs". There is no difference between a blog and a person's home page, except that one usually is now automated (as far as having an interface to use for adding content) and the other is manually done by editing HTML files.
This is like calling murder and rape a "misdemeanor" and claiming that "felonies are down!". No, they aren't. You're just calling them something else now.
Personally, I dont' read ANY BLOGS, unless you count Slashdot. But slashdot is hardly a "blog". When friends or acquaintances offer me their livejournal (or other blog) urls, I tell them "I"m sorry, but I don't read livejournals". It's nothing intended as offense toward them. I just don't waste my time reading things that I don't care about
The thing that offense ME about blogs is that you should take the time to have a conversation with ME and tell ME about your life and what's up. Rather than plastering every daily event and thought to your blog that all of your real life and online buddies read hungrily like little cult followers, take the time to have a conversation with me one on one and tell me things that you want to share with me. Blogs are distant, impersonal and filled with crap. Filter out the crap and TALK WITH ME.
This probably explains why so many more people seem to be talking about so many more topics these days, but have less to say than ever.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Is anything more self-absorbed than blogging?
That anyone would think their life is important enough for the world to read is the height of hubris!
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Check me out on http://www.livejournal.com
But in general I have little use for personal blogs, blogs that are about someone. There are six billion people on this earth. Many of them have fascinating stories to tell. Once they have truly fascinating experiences, I'll be glad to read about it in a biography or autobiography. But until then, they can keep their day-to-days to themselves or others who like to pore over meaningless details. Want to know what I had for breakfast today? Dude, not even I am interested any more.
I do like blogs that are news aggregating sites. That is really useful to me, so it's not as if I ignore all blogs. But blogs as "home pages"? I ignored those too back in the day. And by the way, for a while I tried running my site in parallel as a blog along with the regular URL. It was fun to get comments on the headlines, but it wasn't really blog material. Just felt out of place. So I dropped the blog.
If blogs speak to you, that's wonderful. Have fun. I'll snooze this one out.
I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.
It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.
Titus Barik
Misinformation in the US is up 58%.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
It's interesting to see the reactions from people who still associate blogging with LiveJournals and angst-ridden teenagers. While 90% of blogs are crap, to borrow from Ted Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap.
Blogs offer a huge amount of valuable information. Blogs helped fuel the fire in the Trent Lott affair. Blogs debunked the CBS Bush-ANG memos hoax. There are blogs being written by Iraqis that offer a perspective into Iraq that you would never get anywhere else. Blogs are proving their worth in the tsunami relief efforts as well.
Blogs offer a level of immediacy that the media does not. Rather than allowing a few selected gatekeepers to control the flow of news, blogs offer a wide range of views in a system that acts as a kind of meritocracy. Bloggers tend to be voracious in taking ideas apart. Something like those crudely-forged Bush documents that Dan Rather flogged for weeks were almost immediately debunked by bloggers. Stories that don't have merit are filtered out and stories that wouldn't normally be widely disseminated get far more readership through blogs.
Blogs are nothing less than a distributed form of newsgathering that is having a major effect on online journalism. They're much more than just vanity sites.
Don't get me wrong - I read about six blogs a day, and I truly believe they're the future portal of the Internet. Without blogs, the WWW is mostly comprised of organization websites (companies and universities being the top two), and frankly, that's hideously boring. Blogs are the spiritual successor to Netscape's "What's Cool?" feature, and due to the huge number of blogs, you can probably find two dozen that specifically cater to your interests.
However, I believe that blogs run the risk of being a flash in the pan - of being a trend that seemed really promising, but just never achieved cultural critical mass. I posit that many of these new readers are people who latched onto the buzzword and wanted to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon. When the next shiny thing comes along in twenty minutes, they'll hop off and scurry away. Basically, I'm wondering if many of those new readers will vanish in 2005, and may take with them some of the momentum that drives the community. Remember that many predicted in 1998 that VRML would revolutionize the Internet.
As I see it, greater cultural (mainstream) adoption of blogs is hampered by two factors:
- Absence of a central, well-known blog directory. It's difficult to find new blogs that cater to your interests. It's like an Internet without search engines - in 1995, finding new websites involved stumbling upon them via links from other sites. Imagine if we didn't have telephone books, and if ordering pizza usually involved asking your friends for the number of some good pizza places. That's pretty low-yield, but I feel that's how most need-a-new-blog scavenging missions go. Quite simply, this inefficiency loses readers.
- An overriding interest in new blog technologies that seem to appeal mostly to other bloggers. Seriously, guys. RSS is a good first-draft effort, but it feels extremly dinky and lightweight. I don't understand why bloggers are so enthralled with the concept of immediately receiving the first 50 characters of an update to another blog. For most of us, this is more trouble than it's worth. We'd love to have a service that grabbed entire articles and posts for offline reading, but no such mechanism exists. Similarly, all of the momentum around trackback/pingback is kind of baffling.
These comments are meant strictly as constructive criticism. For a few years, the Internet seemed like it was mostly an electronic storefront for the corporate world, which is pathetic. Blogs are the best hope for bringing life back to the net, and have admirably succeeded. But I want to see this trend continue, not fade away into obscurity.Now, yes, I am aware of sites like Blogwise, which offers some rudimentary blog indexes. My point is that they're not central pillars of the blog community - they're not well-known, indispensible resources. They're not the Google of the blog community. That niche is currently unfilled.
I don't really mean to disparage the general interest in these new technologies. But there seems to be a disproportionate amount of attention paid to them, compared with their practical value, and that momentum could be redirected toward technologies that more of us find genuinely useful. :shrug:
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Here is a related article about people loosing their jobs because of what they have posted to blogs. It raises interesting questions about freedom of speech.
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I worked on Fark before I had even heard the term 'blog', and the nature of it has changed so much since then, that it's say if it's now more or less like a 'blog'. [hell, we even looked at advertising back then to offset the costs, and we got rejected because we didn't generate content, only linked to other people's content, of course, that was before readers could comment]
Here are a few independant parameters that no one can seem to agree on in their definition:
- Personal vs. Group Administered
- Personal vs. Group Contributors
- Frequency of Updates
- Ability for Reader Comments
- Type of Funding
- Amount of Editorial Oversight
- Broad / Narrow Subject Focus
- Generated vs. Linked Content
- Opinionated vs. 'Neutral'
In the early days of the term, it seemed to be more of the 'online diary' type pages, but came to include sites that were collaborative efforts. I'd have listed anything that updated frequently, with a relatively narrow focus (even if that focus was 'things that Bob finds interesting'). Of course, that definiton would have included sites like AlertBox, ScoopThis, or The Onion.These days, the media seems to use the term to apply to any site that posts opinionated information without vetting, and updates on a semi-frequent basis, and in this case, I'm guessing it was whatever they needed to prove that it was a potential 'growth industry' to support whatever agenda they might have.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.