Slashdot Mirror
The Rise and Fall of Blogs
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."
My comments can be found on my blog
How the blogs about saturation of blogs have reached a saturation.
Free XBox, PS2
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.
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
Maybe next they'll take reality TV off the air. Nah, that's probably a bit much to hope for.
I don't have anything against the idea of blogging (I recently set one up myself), but my opinion is that it should be kept as professional as any good magazine. Once that professionalism is breached, it becomes nothing more than a massive IM topic.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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?
Even companies are jumping on the "blog bandwagon" by starting "personal blogs" of their upper management. For what purpose, I cannot ascertain, except probably as an advertising avenue.
I hate it when CNN or some major news channel reports "happenings" from the "Blog world" or "Blogosphere" and waste my time, the viewers' and their own....time that could be better spent on reporting something worthwhile (not that they would anyway).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Why will the traditional media be going anywhere? Blogs serve an interesting and occasionally useful purpose, but will probably always lack the relative objectivity of good news sources such as NPR. For that reason, traditional reporting and news will continue to serve an important role. Claiming that blogs will replace and/or obviate traditional media is, it seems to me, overstating their importance.
Sounds like we've got a blubble.
I pay little attention to blogs because there is no accountability. Here is an example:
/. a while back was a 'story' that Congress had passed a bill that made some law that the /. crowd was sure to be upset about. I went to the story - it was on a blog. It was supported by links to three other stories - all on other blogs. Those stories cross-linked to one another to support themselves. Finally, I went to the Congress' website and searched for the law. The true story: A subcomittee passed a resolution to send the bill to the general floor for discussion.
On
I am NOT claiming that print or video media is better. Once a story gets in a newspaper, it quickly becomes fact. I am also NOT claiming that the public is incapable of having accountability. Look at Wikipedia. There is plenty of accountability with peer oversight. Blogs, on the other hand, do not have any oversight. They don't have to get past an editor or fact-checker. Then, the general public is too lazy to check the facts. You end up with a large group of people believing some idiot's blog-rant to be fact.
I think that is truly it for me - idiots becoming dumber by getting their facts from bigger idiots.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Maybe a million monkeys at typewriters can't produce Shakespeare after all. I think blogs are like almost everything on the Internet. They start out small, get hot, mainstream, and they are all the rage. Then people realize they aren't really adding value.
Blogs change the publishing path, but changing the path doesn't make the content any better. Blogs have enabled people with something intelligent and relevant, who didn't have a way to before, to get themselves heard. Unfortunately it has also allowed a lot of people with nothing to say a way to spew more junk for everyone to filter.
Changing the medium doesn't automatically make better content.
Today, I wish blogs would fall. This comes from two days of intensive googling while I learned how to netboot an original ibook (no boot from USB, no firewire at all) because of a dead cdrom. I was all over the place: open firmware, tftp, bootp, dhcpd, yaboot, and endless useless tangents. I can't tell you how many pages would come in google where my search terms appeared, but were in completely unrelated parts of some knucklehead's blog. For example, blogger mentions ubuntu for ppc is available (a little one liner -- he never used it), and then makes some offhand comment about Apple's proprietary "netboot" server 8 months and 45,000 words later. This kind of junk poisoned a lot of my searches -- I'm not that clear on what my exact searches were anymore (I was up all night) but I can say I was annoyed.
Still, I got ubuntu running on the machine by netbooting the installer off my lan, than installing over the internet. Not bad for a machine with none of the regular routes open for installation.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Hrmm, let's expand the contraction so we get:
Applying some very basic logic, if we accept that blogs 'are not going nowhere,' that must mean that they *are* going somewhere. Agreed?
Now, your next assertion:
*must* be false if we accept, as you have stated earlier (although somewhat illogically), that blogs are going somewhere. The blogs in question can not simultaneously 'not go nowhere' and be 'here to stay.'
Now who's doing the wishful thinking, hrmm?
People that have something to say will have successful blogs. People will link to them. Discuss them. Search engines will learn how to rank these higher. Those with nothing to say will get no traffic, no links, and fail. Just like in real life, some people say valuable things and other people waste a little bit of your life by speaking. Anyway, isn't Slashdot a group blog with comments like any other? I can't tell the difference.
Since you seem to have trouble connecting, then just think of those millions of "shitty" blogs as an incredible historical resource.
What would we give to get semi-daily commentary about personal problems and day-to-day events from the 1800s? (Answer: a lot. A LOT)
People forget that big events are pretty well documented in history, but we loose the ephemera all too easily. Personal blogs are ephemera to the extreme.
What your cat did today is not news for the entire world to hear.
If you don't like my cat blog, quit reading it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I've never really understood this sentiment. Blogs aren't like TV. They're not pushed to you. If you like someone's "What Scruffy the Cat Did Today" blog, you can grab the RSS feed and get your daily dose of Scruffy amusement. But if you don't like it, it's not like there's nothing else on the Internet.
The beauty of the blogging medium is that what you read is up to you. You can go with soley corporate-sponsored blogs. You can read obscure rants from marginally intelligent blogs that have only three readers. You can concoct your own mix. However you choose to make use of blogs, the tremendous variety of thoughts, opinions, and stories is what makes the phenomenon so powerful.
I'd hate to see blogging become just another means of obtaining pre-vetted "useful" (as defined by whom?) information from the usual sources.
I'm not going to be reading the Scruffy the Cat blog any time soon, but I'm happy it's out there.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Slashdot is not a weblog. It is a forum. It is not some "Real World" WebTV, aka, weblogs, where you just sit and consume some emo's angst and marvel at his or her lack of taste in music.
It is a community where a large number of people have discussions (and flame each other) about various news topics.
A weblog is one-way 'entertainment'.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Why will the traditional media be going anywhere?
I agree. I don't know about anybody else, but despite what the original article post says, 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? Hell, if you were in a safe enough place to sit and blog about it, then you just weren't close enough to even know what was really going on.
Blogs are a terrible source of news, IMO. They are a better source of opinion, maybe, and for bantering about things like the latest gadgets, but anyone who's either sitting at home typing up a bunch of crap or worse, simply posting a bunch of links to some other "real" news site, is not doing anybody much good at all. And even for opinion, they really mainly exist for those who want to have their egos stroked by finding others whose opinions simply help confirm their own...
I read blogs, and I write one too (when I feel like updating it, which isn't often). But they're hardly a replacement for traditional news. The whole blog craze reminds me a lot of the dot-com era, where everybody thought these small little online startups were going to come in and sweep the big, old, crusty traditional companies out of the way... Then reality set in. The same thing's probably going to happen with blogs. Does that mean blogs serve no purpose? No - I mean, technically, Slashdot is a blog. Engadget is a blog. Gizmodo is a blog. I read these multiple times per day.
But for real breaking news, and for real informed opinion, there is no way for blogs to compete with traditional news media. After all, you generally at least need a college degree to get a job in the news industry - I'm not sure how much you can trust your average high school dropout with access to a PC and a free blogger.com account. (Of course, traditional media's had its own share of problems the past couple years, but then that's partly because they're actually held to some sort of ethical standard. Blogs are not held to any standards whatsoever, and any blogger can get away with pretty much anything they want, however erroneous or borderline slanderous their statements may be.)