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The Rise and Fall of Blogs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the please-fall-faster dept.

i-Love-to-blog writes "Blogs have revolutionized information delivery. They not only made the world much more smaller, but a lot more personal, united and un-afraid as well. Events like the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion made news channels take a back seat. Wired claimed blogs to be what Napster was to music. They even have a wager on Weblogs outranking the New York Times Web site by 2007. People got paid to blog. Then they got fired for that. Some lost money for blogging their ideas. Most just hand out links these days. When was the last time your favorite blogger talked sense? Have blogs reached a saturation point? Blogging burnout is a humorous look at the rise and fall of weblogs."

5 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. Rise and FALL? by daniil · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This is what i call wishful thinking.

    Seriously, the guy's daydreaming or something, as no matter how much he should wish for it to be so, blogs aren't going nowhere (unless, of course, the masses of bloggers somehow manage to cause the internet to collapse under its own weight -- which i doubt. But even if they do, then i'm sure someone will still start a LiveJournal-on-a-cow or something like that). They might not retain their current form, but still, blogs are here to stay. The traditional media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- will be the ones to go, if they don't adapt to the new situation. And this should please anyone that considers themselves a liberal person.

    - [tt]

    --
    Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
    1. Re:Rise and FALL? by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are a few blogs I read. Most read like someone's diary, and I certainly don't consider them under normal circumstances to be any kind of "source". I think they're to the Internet what web pages were six or seven years ago. Everyone had a web page where they had pictures of their ugly kids, their ugly dogs, their ugly house, their ugly car and a ton of ugly animated GIFs. Eventually these pages just faded away, largely because the ISPs hosting them merged or went out of business, but the interesting pages survived. I think it's going to be the same with blogs.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  2. The Real Question is: by BWJones · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The real question is how many blogs are actively maintained and is there any useful information in those blogs that are maintained? I started "blogging" per se back in 2001 making irregular entries up until February of this year, when I decided to post more regularly. However there is content there that gets an incredible amount of traffic. I get several hundred Google hits/day for everything from specific images to reviews I did for Macintosh specific stuff like CPU upgrades and commentary about the science of vision loss when using Viagra. Surprisingly, there are many search terms where my blog comes up in the first three Google and Yahoo searches, and my site is a very small personal site where I write mostly for friends and family. Friends blogs that cover more specific issues such as venture capital or more common interest subjects garner traffic in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits per day. However, there are many blogs with infrequent entries, and low traffic levels that may in fact contain very useful information. The trick (search companies know) is to find that information and rank it according to its usefulness, playing off of the Long Tail Model of Chris Anderson.

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
  3. Over-time by TrippTDF · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think blogs are still at an early stage, and their full potential has yet to be realized.

    I like the idea of a future where virtually everyone is putting their ideas down for others to read. As the internet generation gets older, I think it will be more common for everyone to keep a weblog. The benefit to business is huge... imagine if every office worker was required to spend a few minutes a week on a company weblog, posting their ideas for managers and others to look at, or maybe if there was a company message board setup like Slashdot?

  4. My Primary Source of News on 9/11 by Carnage4Life · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I was pretty glued to my local news channel on 9/11 (here in New York). Is anyone actually going to sit there and tell me in all seriousness that their primary source of news and info on 9/11 was somebody's blog?

    Actually mine was Slashdot and Slashdot is a blog. I don't watch TV and I get most of my news online. Slashdot happened to be the only news-ish website that wasn't buckling under the weight of the traffic on 9/11.