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."

Comments

Re:Meh.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think it's easy to downplay "blogs"* but didn't they have a strong influence in how some elections played out? They seem to have been instrumental in getting out some embarassing facts that certain politicians didn't want known and wasn't covered by the regular media. Wasn't the video of evidence of Pat Robertson's lie first posted on a web log?

* I really don't like the name, hence the quotes.

It's not in decline - just changing as always

[kallisti777]

So the gist of the article is that geeks adopt technology early, then abandon that technology once the masses start to use it and lower the signal to noise ratio. Reasonable enough. What I'd like to know is why isn't this article called "The Rise of Geek Podcasting"?

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.

"Geek Bloggers" versus "Consumer Bloggers"

[mdwh2]

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.

Re:No kidding!

[drsquare]

Not really.

A 'blog' is someone's personal journal, which is on the Internet. These comments aren't a diary. Slashdot is just a normal forum, with the discussions attached to news stories.

The only 'blog-like' thing on this site is the journal facility, which hardly anyone uses.