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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've never heard of the blogs that were linked to in the blurb. I don't read blogs, unless you count Slashdot - which I dont' really since Slashdot is just a regular website (when was the last time Taco talked about his trip somewhere or hemos gave the breakdown on his relationship or.. anything from any of them in fact).
I didn't even know blogs have been around that many years. I didn't even really know about them as "blogs" until a year or two ago. And there aren't really blogs that I care to read. I look at engadget, but I dont' see how that's a blog either. It's more of a bunch of links than a blog. Or are we now calling collections of links "blogs" as well? And blogs that are links to blogs about blogs about blogs are blogs, too?
I couldn't care less what happens to blogs. Let all the 12 year olds and single moms flood the net with them. Nobody's forcing me to read that crap.
Blogs are just instant-sites for those with what they think is something important to say that don't have the intelligence or interest in setting up their own actual website.
In other words, I guess this sort of effects me the same way telling me Dawson's Creek is about to be canceled would. I simply wouldn't care because it has nothing to do with my life or my interests.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
I've never understood the claim that Slashdot is a blog. Being short for "web log", I know Slashdot is a web site, but where is the log part? I've always understood log as in diary or records of events done on a specific object. It really doesn't make sense to say that it's a log of all of nerd-dom (or nerd-dumb) because that's pretty vague rather than specific.
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.
I've never understood the claim that Slashdot is a blog. Being short for "web log"
It is quite simply because weblogs, at their core, are just "articles" posted about one subject, with links to other areas of the web with more details on that particular subject, and a place for other people to comment on the article.
Sound familiar now?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.