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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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.)