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Geek Blogging is in Decline
p0 writes " Geek blogging is in decline. Can the geek bloggers be saved? Saving is probably not the right word, because there is always going to be a market place for the Dave Winers of this world; it's just that their audience will continue to shrink in relation to market share in comparison to other existing, and yet to be written blogs. [New consumer] bloggers aren't going to be interested in Winer driving a car and finding free internet access, nor Scoble playing with alpha technologies with other geeks whilst seemingly camped out in someone's office."
I guess that makes it news if you find it in a blog.
2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.
Yah geek blogging is dead.
Topics like those listed in the article summary are maybe only vaguely interesting once. I know I get bored discussing that stuff over and over again. The geeks that do discuss things like that repeatedly are the ones that bore my socks off. Imagine what the general public must think when they come across something like that.
In related news, early adopters are eventually joined by late adopters in an event that has been dubbed as "popularity."
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
It's official!
Careful, well thought out blog pieces are on the decline, and are in danger of becoming extinct as muddled or non-thinkers take over the web!
If you don't believe me, just look at the evidentory piece cited above.
Is it based on Percentage? Just because there is a million idiots out there flooding the internet with their blogs its lowering the percentage of geeks that do it.
No big deal
keanmarine.com
Hopefully the ordinary blogging will follow.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
I thought it was the geeks who were the ones who blogged.
I think most people recognized the blogging craze as just that: a fad that will ebb along with every other fad...
Sure, there are those blogs that will always have readers, posters, etc...but (hopefully) the days of "OMG...I HAVE A BLOG!!! READ IT!!" are over.
This is reminding me of the whole internet boom, except with way less invested.
In Unrelated News: Dork and Nerd Blogs are on the rise.
mnewberg.com
Have been since about 1995.
In the five or so years prior to that, as the geeks were the first to establish presences on the Web (both as individuals and for their companies), we wrote the HTML, load-balanced the servers, and photo-shopped and [saints preserve us...] ShockWaved our heinies off, cuz the medium was so new, no one knew it looked like crap. It was just new tech, and we were the tech guys, so, we did it. All of it, including the design and content stuff that we had no business having anything to do with. Circa mid-90's, proper business practices began to develop, and the professional content and design people "moved on to the Web," and we geeks, for the most part, found ourselves back in the server rooms and behind our compilers where we belonged.
What are "blogs" but 21st century "personal web pages?" The content management software is slicker than the vi and notepad.exe we used 15 years ago, but the intents are the same. And we Geeks were once again at the forefront (and it showed, in most of the pedantic content). Now, big media and other corporations have caught the new-old wave, and the content people too busy with their professional deadlines up to now are finally being pointed towards the direction of the -- dare I say it? -- 'blogosphere.' Geeks, once the blogging majority, find their mindshare getting edged out by pro writers, photographers, designers, and people who just have more interesting lives about which to blog.
It's not a bad thing.
In the meantime, the geeks are moving into podcasting, and so the Circle of Life continues... (cue the zebras...)
Geeks like to do things differently. They're also early adopters. When blogs become the universal tool for 13 year olds to post about their feelings about becoming a woman, random guys posting about their new cars, all manners of Roland Piquepailles making a fat buck out of it, and any old idiot raving and ranting about things nobody gives a shit about, geeks get tired of it, disillusioned and move on to the next New Cool thing[tm] that's probably there already, just still under the radar.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A PHPPhD?
A PHP2D?
2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.
Yah geek blogging is dead
I don't know, isn't there a sci-fi show on cable somewhere right now? That can explain geeks not responding in a timely manner.
My guess, is that geeks don't find blogs that fun, or cool. While everyone else who doesn't know much about computers thinks this is the coolest think since sliced bread and its simple to do. Just log into a blog site and start blogging about their life or whatever they want to talk about and most of it is pointless rants about nothing. Just fludding the internet with more crap that google searches have to sort through for us to get our answers about the geek things we are looking for.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
12345
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A PhD Hypertext Processor?
But there seems to be a glut of excellent Geek Podcasts - I guess that eventually there were so many of us that a few had to end up with some form of charisma.
Monkeys, Typewriters, you know the drill. Imagine if you will that when we reach some 'critical mass' of geeks, one of us will statistically be socially adept and even capable of balancing an active social life with rampant Geeking-out. It's like the Matrix only with less IP theft.
Is this the new "Hot Grits"?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
/. is safe as houses though!
I have my own geek blog, and it's not just any other blog, it has it's own special features in the way it works etc, yeah, I'll open it up soon, but until it's sorted it will remain closed.
That's not terribly useful right now, but I see the geek blog as a can of food for google. The more detail I put into the blog, the more chance users will hit my site, and thus use the paypal button.
I do watch the webalizer statistics, and certain searches do repeat, so the demand for the data is there, so the demand too for writers does exist.
We need to take a look at what was going on two or three years ago, security was a much more interesting subject, and people were beginning to go wireless, windows XP was also new and interesting.
Right at the moment the newest thing for joe public is windows 2003, so it's all quiet at the moment, and I don't think this is really going to have any earth shattering effect on things generally.
Why UNIX?
Since when is technology the sole defining characteristic of geeks? I'm a geek. I blog about books that I'm reading. I seem to recall reading being a geeky activity, ergo it's a geek blog.
You don't need teh mad skillz to get Linux running on a spoon in order to be a geek.
Pomme de Terre!
Oh, I don't know about decline...let's look at it like this: Gaming was once considered "geeky", now it's almost the best way for random strangers to meet and unite behind a common goal, i.e. to win. 1up.com has an extensive blogging network, and I daresay most of it is, or WAS geeky in nature. It all depends on how you use the word. Not all geeks are the Dilbert type. Some are more extroverted, and though their interests are deep in the geek world, they can express themselves with the clarity and excitement of a Dan Brown or Clive Cussler. So I would imagine this "decline" is true...but only for a given value of true.
"I drank WHAT?!"--Socrates
YAZBS (Yet Another Zonk Blogging Story)
Look for the magic word in the title/summary/links:
One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen
There's probably more, but there's definitely a trend: If you want a story posted on Slashdot, find (or in some cases, make up) blog-related "news" while Zonk is on duty
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Geeks are prettymuch by definition not good at being popular. Any time you have a new technology, geeks are the ones who can figure out how to use it first, early adopters, etc. Then it becomes easier to use, available to the masses, and the "cool kids" take over, leaving the kids at the back of the cafeteria to find the next cool thing. I'm sure it was the same thing with stone tablets, parchment, movable type, recordable audio, film, etc. Same pattern.
Now, let's forget this blogging crap, and move onto those "R2D2 Princess Leia Obi won you're my only hope" - style holigrams...
Every slashdotter already knows this. I mean, this place has been in decline for years.
Nothing to see here...
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You write your thoughts down on a web page? that's a blog
You keep a travel diary on the web? That's a blog.
You keep an updated todo list on the web? That's a blog.
You keep track of your projects on a web page? That's a blog.
You keep an updated list of links to tech/news/gossip/anything? That's a blog.
Blogging is like the word "smurf".
Of *course* blogging is important if you label every fucking thing on the web "a blog".
Why can't we get over all these stupid meta-blogging articles, and realise that it's just fucking "content creation by individuals" and it doesn't need a fucking name.
Cool, but useless.
market place for the Dave Winer's of this world, its just that their audience
If less geek blogging means fewer misused apostrophes, I'm all for it.
This comes at a time when I just removed my blog. I was planning to put it back up again but its still interesting that this study came out.
I tend to agree with the idea that its not really geeks are blogging less but there are more nongeeks blogging. That is a logical thing that is happening.
For instance 10 years ago only geeks knew what mp3s were and used them but now everyone knows the term and everyone can easily download them. This is just another example of an internet service/idea that has gone mainstream.
Ok, so more people is discovering blogs nowadays. Since geeks are a minority, there is not shocking news that geek blogs are becomming less common.
Rethinking email
This is very similar to what happens to popular tech/geek sites and their audience over time. At the beginning we have early adopters, and those tend to be technically savvy people and geeks. Web server log analysis shows high percentage of Firefox and Safari browsers. Time passes, and the site becomes known to less techy people. Web server log analysis starts showing a decline in Firefox users and increase in Internet Explorer users, despite Firefox slowly taking over and spreading among the typical Internet users. This must have happened with Google, and this is now happening to Simpy, an increasingly popular social bookmarking and personal web service.
The same phenomenon happened in the world of blogs, where bloggers like Steve Rubel said they wakt up at 4-5AM in order to beat the other blogging crown and blog news first. Of course, that can't last very long. When people like that run out of steam, regular, more normal and numerous bloggers enter the stage.
Simpy
It is just like podcasting, anyone who has ever put an audio file on a web site before last fall was a looser/nerd/geek, but the minute Curry gave it a PR-firm-friendly name and a few lines of XML, what many of my pals had been doing (on a really small scale) with their self-produced music, random thoughts, and crazy sound fx since 1994 (FTP and Mosaic baby) is now..."hip"???
The term blogger to me is offencive because most blogs are written by people who, quite frankly, have NOTHING to say, have no design skills, and think that they are 1337 because they can hit a few buttons on blogger.com.
Ok, not to make fun of any site, because mine is certainly more stupid than most, but a blog posting from a blogging newspaper that blogs about the buzz in the blogosphere is not really going to generate any emotion with me on the topic of the decline of geek blogs. Maybe the geeks got sick of their own rants and giving free advertising. Or, all of the once-cool, hip, blogsters have moved on to more interesting things... like Wiki's. Yes, geeks have produced enough hot air causing their own ascension out of the blogosphere and into the wikisphere.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
"there is always going to be a market place for the Dave Winer's of this world"
As far as I'm concerned, that's not contrary to good blogging being in decline, that's EVIDENCE of it.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
It's actually quite interesting to watch the dynamic between many of the right wing media rising stars like Michelle Malkin and Ben Shapiro and the bloggers on the right. Shapiro for example has been writing whiny pieces about being called a chickenhawk because he is a 21 year old rich kid who advocates empire and yet would rather go to harvard law than into the army. Malkin got severely challenged by Vox Day to a debate over the accuracy of her military facts in her book on internment which she wrote a bunch of blog posts and articles for many news publications about. The one thing you see a lot of is that the people who get big in any type of media, and blogging is a type of media, are people who regurgitate news such as the "metabloggers" (Instapundit for example) and bloggers who pretty much whore themselves out to one of the popular groups like the Republicans.
The bigger the personality, the less they like actually engaging the public. That's why I don't read Powerline, even though I am firmly on the right. IMO any blog that doesn't allow for comments or trackbacks, and isn't as big as Instapundit and a metablog (which would make comments/trackbacks VERY expensive to despam) is a blog I won't read. No matter how good it may seem, I won't read the blog unless it's really something you'd never get from the MSM like Michael Yon's coverage of the War in Iraq.
Seriously people, go into a big book store like a B&N or a BAM and look at the political magazines. The biggest ones are the ones that more often reiterate talking points than ones that are cool and challenge people to think. Reason for example, arguably one of the best political publications in the USA, has a readership I think that doesn't even reach 60,000 nation-wide. Yet the National Review, a rag by comparison, probably has at least ten times that because of the support of the Republican faithful.
Here's a cold, hard truth. Most people don't like their ideas being challenged. Clinton supporters always wanted to believe it was about sex and not purjury. Bush supporters can't fathom the possibility that Bush lied about Iraq and has absolutely no interest in defending our sovereignty. Most people like their nice little pre-conceived notions and have very limited real interests. It gets even worse when you get into technical areas like geek blogging because the market is inherently smaller.
If you're going to do your own thing, be prepared to not have much support from the general public. That's all there is to it. It may not be that geek blogging is going into decline, it's probably just that geek blogging is being severely eclipsed by other parts of the blogging world which IS GREAT for online civil liberties. We want blogging to be part of most Americans lives because it gets them active online with free speech. The more people get used to using their rights, the more people will actually notice a loss when they're stripped of them. You can't miss something you never had or used.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
the net would be if it stayed the domain of pure geeks and no one else?
I often feel that these type of articles aren't about signal-to-noise ratio which it implies but about old-generation-vs-new-generation elitism.
I experienced similiar constant bitching in anime where all the old dogs (80&90s - so not exactly the real old dogs) claimed to have more taste, more intelligence, and more knowlege than the new generation coming on the scene. I usually only noticed the only difference between the two was that the newer generation had a higher percentage of those who know Japanese.
I feel this is of a similiar vein.
Oh!
I used to have Scolbe's and Doc Searls's blogs in my Bookmarks, but I haven't had them for months, because after a while, I just got tired of hearing the same tunes and the same philosophies. New bloggers are coming out every day with refreshing and unique angles of their own, and if they're good, the fans of Scolbe and Doc Searls will discover them and switch their loyalty in a Bookmark second.
This is nothing new. It happens to every medium. Like TV, for instance, at one point, people just got tired of "Seinfeld", or "Friends", so the shows got canceled, then the new Thursday-night lineups were announced, and life continued. It's called "evolution", and it's healthy.
Also, I think the term "geek blogger" is a bit oxymoronic, because a blogger IS a geek. The notion that somebody out there with the looks of Angelina Jolie is blogging away merrily is... Well, keep fantasizing. I maintain a blog (at: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/) for personal enjoyment, and I assume the thousands of people who sign up for new accounts every day are doing it with similar intent -- nothing unhealthy there.
Sun and Fun
Horray!
Boo Hoo - OK, now I'm over it.
Bob The Angry Flower's Guide to the Apostrophe
Geek blogging is in decline. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Feedster 500 or Technorati 100 today and compare it to the Technorati Top 100 over the last few years. Take a look back in time to the top 10 in the Techorati Top 100 on November 26, 2002 and you'll see the generation of founding geek bloggers dominating the list: Doc Searls, Dave Winer...fast forward a year and things have started to change.
So, for geek tools, geeks usually get there first. Since, umm, they are the ones to create the tools. So since 100% of the users are geeks, then the top 10 lists will be dominated by geeks. So when it spreads into the non geek world, where there are more non geeks than geeks, hence 'non geek world', some percentage of the users will be non geeks. Non geeks will be more interested in what non geeks have to say, so top 10 lists will no longer be doninated by geeks.
In other words, when there are a bunch of apples, all of them are apples. When you throw in some oranges, they aren't all apples anymore. They are apples and oranges. I know its hard to follow, but trust me, its true.
The ability to write != the ability to reason.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
It'd be worth it just to never see another post from such an arrogant, pompus ass.
Hopefully not!
I have no desire to do a solitary tech blog either, and it would seem like a waste for me, but something like Advogato I do have a sort of blog on. The last time I wrote a lot there was when I switched my desktop from Windows to Linux. I also posted an entry asking for recommendations for web hosting that needed MySQL, PHP, PERL etc. and got some good replies. So that type of collaborative thing makes more sense to me, especially being I rarely post. But my stuff runs alongside people like Bram Cohen there, so people tend to read it.
GEEK BLOGGING ON THE DECLINE! NOOOOOOOOO11111 THIS STORY IS WAY TOO INTENSE FOR ME1111111111 TELL ZONK TO STOP!! PLEASE, MY HEART CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE111111111111
</sarcasm>
"Geek blogging in decline."
Simple law of the survival of the fittest. Failure to breed leads to extinction.
All "its" used on this page till now (Sat Aug 27 21:56:49 EDT 2005) should have been "it's". -- s/its/it's/g
I don't think this is a decline. As the popularity and need for the Internet is growing so fast, more and more people(consumers) have access to this internet. 10-15 years back mostly geeks or IT pros had access to the internet. At that time even this site ("Slashdot.org - News for Nerds) was not so popular as we see today.
Things change! WTF?!!! When did this start? Aaaaagh! It's the end of the world. Things are changing!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Idiots like Winer and Searls and the "inner circle" of blogging always act like people MUST listen to them. Perhaps the audience has finally learned they have nothing to say.
It can only be a good thing when self-appointed Blog Emperors(tm) are discovered to be wearing no clothes.
Discussing (in a blog) about an article in a blog about "blogging is dead" is dead!
Check out the iTunes Top 100: Leo Laporte and his TechTV pals have two or three shows each, PBS science programming is in the top ten, and a couple of sysadmins with no budget were ranked higher than Fox News yesterday. Every idiot and their dog might have a live journal, but can they produce Internet radio?
This is Usenet all over again. Move along, nothing to see... we geeks know where to find each other.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
Exactly. So, what have they built, and what are they building now? I think the next chic-geek bandwagon could be contributing to wikis or being part of an OSS development team...
Who's your user, program?
Slashdot's "sucks index" is higher now than it used to be.
--
make install -not war
A million bully pulpits, and multimillion people that don't have time to read it all. Blogging has imploded. Geek bloggers are like other bloggers; some excellent but the signal to noise ratio favored noise. Now, let Darwin rule. Some will survive. Others are dead, rest their souls. Oh, they're not dead yet? Reach for the twit filter-- quickly!
Diaries and journals are good. Blather is bad. A good geek knows the difference and we value that. Bad geeks blather, and the noise shelf overcomes the signal. A bien tot.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Please, let blogging die. Better, let geek blogging die sooner. Let "blogging" go back to the A/S/L and Aimgirl crowd, the personal Geocities and "here's me and my kids at some function" crowd.
Geeks blogging just lends some credibility to the whole filthy practice.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
and I'm glad this one is dead.
I think the question of why people Blog is being begged by this story. I can think of about 4 broad reasons for doing so: 1: Therapy 2: Spreading Information 3: Ego Boos 4: Money The rise and fall of marketshare is presumably paramount to bloggers motivated by Ego (i.e. having a popular blog) and Money (higher click-through rates and volume). It is less important to those blogging for the first two reasons. In my case, blogging offers theraupetic qualities which are unaffected by volume. I get to "think out loud" anonymously whether it's read by thousands of people, or none. I know the information I offer is valuable - but to whom? Mainly to software developers in the corporate world, and to some extent to employees in general, and maybe some management types who want to know how others run their kingdom. These are the only demographic that I care about. It's completely irrelevant that these people may constitute a very small percentage of the general blog readership. I am sure that most bloggers blog for the same reasons I do, and not for plain ego or money. Therefore it does not really matter what percentage of the total marketshare we get.
Mock Tech Interviews & Free Resume Review
Slashdot is dying.
I never knew ye. Seriously, I can't say I've ever read a blog except as a link from here. Maybe we can go back to plan files instead. Or maybe, just maybe, we can keep our stupid opinions to ourselves. But look where I'm posting...
Blogging IMHO has probably never been a pastime of the genuinely intelligent. (And before I get flamed as a hypocrite, yes, I have a blog, but I haven't regularly updated it since March or so, and it was an effort back then)
;)
I probably only really got a Blogger account at all out of some vague, misguided desire to "stay current," but the main reason why I've virtually never used it is because I generally try and fill my time with far more productive things...like, say, working.
Blogging IMHO is probably the single most utterly useless convention to have appeared online so far. It seems to have primarily caught on in the US where, presumably because of the current fascist dictatorship which is euphemistically referred to as a democratic government, the population are enthusiastic about blogging as their only form of even partially genuine democratic expression. As for the rest of us, who live in countries where the system still actually works, (if only to a minor degree) we either engage in offline (read: effective) forms of activism, or devote our lives to far more constructive persuits.
The author seems to be confusing two different styles of blog.
The first is someone who writes (often on a standalone website) with the intention of being read by and being interesting to complete strangers. This corresponds to the first two generations.
The second, what he calls "consumer bloggers". These may use a blog for various reasons, such as personal journalling, or communicating with friends, but it's rarely intended that what they write is targetted to people who don't know them. Similarly, such people are unlikely to read blogs other than those of their friends.
Whilst there are crossovers, these are very distinct usages (so much so, that I always feel it's misleading to group them under the term "blogger" - "blog" is just a medium, and says nothing about the usage or intention of the writing).
If the first has given way to the second, I guess it's because few people want to read things written by strangers, even if they are quite interesting, and the second usage of blogs is far more powerful. But I see no evidence that the first style of blogging is in decline, and even if it is, this may not be related to "consumer blogging" at all.
I also feel the author has the timelines wrong for "consumer blogging" - LiveJournal for example has been around since 1999, which always made it easy to set up a blog (the author claims it was "a damn site harder to set up a blog than it is now" even in 2002!) and since about 2002, the vast majority of people I know have had blogs, and used them as "consumer blogs".
The term "geek blogger" is a bit misleading too - most of the people I know with blogs could be considered "geeks", but they're using them in the style of consumer blogging, rather than the first style of blogging.
Real geeks never blogged in the first place.
Real geeks never blogged in the second place.
Blogs are for self-promoting wankers.
How hard is this for people to figure out?
Parent makes a good point. There's nothing to see here. Move along.
.plan file. I remember typing "finger johnc@idsoftware.com" to find out the latest dirt on Quake. It wasn't called blogging at the time. It was just the Internet. The Internet back then was pretty new to most people.
Sure we could all talk about the evolution of blogging, but framing the discussion in terms of a "decline" of geek blogging, and that blogging by technical people is something that must be "saved' is simply a ridiculous form of spin.
Oh, I remember the good old days when a blog was a
Nowadays, blogging is more an online way of sharing stuff with your friends. The average blog is probably only read by a dozen people who know the blogger. It's a way of posting your digital photos and yakking about your life. A substitute for an email mailing list. Big deal.
Much has been made of blogging. The Howard Dean phenomenon. The blogosphere. It's all pretty retarded. Lo and behold, people are posting their thoughts and opinions on web pages. How novel.
Just because, everyone else is doing it in their mundane way should stop anyone from being what they are. use NanoBlogger(http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/ on your Unix System instead of blogger. That should do!
Senthil
The word has cropped up and everyone assumes they know what it means. But to me it seems that different people have assigned different meanings to the word yet aren't making their definitions explicit, so everyone is talking about the same thing. Does geek simply mean an affinity to computers? To some people it seems that just having a home page or spending more than twelve hours a week on the computer is enough to be considered a geek. To other people it simply means that you weren't popular in high school. To others, geek means being a fan of some sort of science fiction or other genre, whether on TV, in movies, or in books. So what means this geek?
But in response, I really could care less about geek blogging. First of all, I haven't seen any blogs that are halfway interesting. Or even those blogs that do have an interesting intellectual argument every now and then are damned by repeated references to their cute cat or some guy at the supermarket. A blog is really something simple: it's a journal that you share to the public. But I have a better idea--how about instead a complog? The name almost sounds trendy enough to work. The idea is simple, keep a journal on your computer (or call it diary if you want) only *don't* share it with the public. Yes, we don't care, and we don't want to know. So, when is this trend going to take off? Anyone?
I know this is somewhat off topic, so I thought I'd reply to myself with this question. I know some hackers have their own blogs, but it seems to me that most of these self-identifying geeks have never written a line of code. Or maybe they consider HTML and CSS "code". The same thing has happened to slashdot, this website used to be prowling with coders and wannabe coders; now I think most of the hackers have left for the most part. Among the geeks I used to know, "trend" and "fashion" weren't things in our vocabulary, or if we refered to it we looked down upon it. Has this changed? Have the geeks themselves changed or do we have an influx of new people now calling themselves geeks? Has being a geek become trendy all of sudden?
Anyway, maybe I'll submit a poll to slashdot to see if there are any hackers left on this site.
Who gives a shit? Really? This has to be one of the most pointless posts on Slashdot I've seen. It's worse than a dupe. How long before this gets duped? What do they take us for? I'm glad I didn't even fucking read it.
The geeks were destroyed when the dot-com bubble burst. Blogging, including geek blogging, is all about signal to noise ratios. As more people get into blogging, the noise level goes up. Since there is less signal, gee, there must be a decline. It's like saying Hollywood's profits are down because of piracy. No it couldn't be because most of their movies suck. No that couldn't be it. Oh, wait. They finally admitted to that. What a bunch of fucking dorks, er, geeks.
Children being potty trained think that turds are suitable to be given as presents. It's because parents are so happy they aren't crapping in their pants anymore. When I first heard of blogs I thought it was just another name for turds.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I never was a fan of blogging. If these people have something important to say, I will hear about it without dredging through their garbage. At first blogging was OK, but once it became mainstream (the moment the word blogging was coined), the field became flooded with worthless junk from idiots that aren't listened to in the real world. In short, your opinions are unimportant unless A. they support my opinions or B. you have some sort of authority that enables you to spread your opinions (in which case you should keep them to yourself).
Feel free to comment, but either way keep in mind that, unlike some people, I have better things to do than look and see what complete strangers think about my ideas.
Last Post!
Geeks, unfortunately, will be overcome by average folks who will be overcome by spammers who will be overcome by porn. It's what we can evolution. Don't we?
Any geek bloggers around? Please drop me a comment at my blog. Thanks! :)
w00t
Netcraft confirms it.
Mods: -1: old and painfully overused joke
By which I obviously refer to the one true geek blog (found all over the net):
Bugzilla.
Poor bastard made a bad call and covered up his adultry. But you know, I can forgive him that perjury...why? It had nothing to do with his ability as a president. He just didn't want his wife to break his balls.
Now, when a president lies and orders his underlings to mis-represent facts to support that lie...and doesn't get an impeachment trial...that's when I get worried.
Blar.
The same here. I very rarely found anything informative or fun in "blogs" -- not to mention that they polluted search engines with self-centered banalities.
Instead of "blogs" lets get back to focused web sites, to content.
Warning: Grammar Nazi mode
"Judging by the amount of responses to this article"
Choose one: amount of response | number of responses.
This has been a recurring phenomenon from the dawn of geekdom. As (if) a technology gains mainstream acceptance, the ur-core of geeks in the field get crowded out, and sometimes marginalized.
An example: At the dawn of computer gaming, the ultra-geeky wargaming hobby was "big thing" to do on computers. As the Madden-ization of the gaming progressed, wargaming was pushed to the fringes, catered to by mailorder-only outfits such as Matrixgames (www.matrixgames.com) or Battlefront (www.battlefront.com).
earlier than the generic uptake.
It isn't in decline, it is in decline relative to the total amount of blogs. Also, as the geek blogs are older, there is more chance that they will reach their end of life before the newer blogs. Thirdly a large number of them are now doing podcasts instead of blogs, or using the blogs to merely announce their geeky podcast. Some of which are alright, like the daily sourcecode.
So what is the issue?
Sorry, but you forgot to make up a ridiculous and unnecessary new term for "geek blogging." This is how things are done in the blogosphere. Glogging perhaps?
Holy hell! How can you get confused about something like that? OK, he's new to Macs but sheesh! My mother did it herself, from webbased instructions, and she's no computer geek just a computer user.
I find it very scary that everyone with internet connection can read what I think. I mean, if they want to read my mind, let them come with the newly-invented mind-reading gadget -- at least I can counter it with tin foil.
...yeah I'm paranoid.
Based on what I write in a blog, they'd find out how my mind works, what I spend most of my time on etc. That is why I keep my blog on my hard drive safely away from the internet. Those that can access it are either trustworthy or leet haxx0rs.
If you compare the two technorati links, the first thing you see is that the numbers of blog links is higher. In 2-3 years, that's to be expected.
/. got wind of it and commented on the author's good reasoning.
The author also states we are in a more consumer blog error. Well duh, compare this to websites back in 1993/94 and again in 1996/97 after the consumer market got wind of it. In 1993, all of the websites were geek-ish, the early adopters. By 1997, businesses were everywhere and producing brochure sites for non-geeks.
Hence, the percentage of geek stuff is down. We're a small percentage of the population so in the end we'll be a small percentage of the blog world. What surprises me is that geek blogs are not further down the list. Face it, you'll have to come up with something new to regain your l33t ego boost.
What really scares me is:
a) This guy wrote that many words and missed the point.
b) People actually read it before
PS. I just read the article's comments and Seth Finkelstein also noticed the author miss-analyzed the technorati rankings.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
with a trendy name. It's like podcasting: the newest phenom that we've been doing for the last decade.
when we all created our first personal websites 10+ years ago cuz it was new and interesting. I blog now just for the search engines. If I wanna bitch about something or praise it to hopefully save someone using google some research time. These people that blog every event in their lives will get bored with it sooner or later.
NoOoOoOOoooOOOoOoOOoOo (in Shatner's Kahn yell)
Say it ain't so!!!!!
Maybe it's because they use words like "whilst".
Wikipedia isn't a blog even though it doesn't stay static. Yes, one could write a scraper feed for its front page. Yes, there's an RSS feed with diffs for recent edits.
However, unlike Slashdot, Wikipedia does not timestamp it's articles and send them out into the world. Therefore, Wikipedia is not a blog. Answers.com is not a blog. Slashdot does.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.