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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 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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
Bob The Angry Flower's Guide to the Apostrophe
"Geek blogging in decline."
Simple law of the survival of the fittest. Failure to breed leads to extinction.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
By which I obviously refer to the one true geek blog (found all over the net):
Bugzilla.
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.
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).
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.
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