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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."
2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.
Yah geek blogging is dead.
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
Hopefully the ordinary blogging will follow.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
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...)
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.
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.
I think you have the causality the wrong way around. It's geeks that build things like blogging tools and it's geeks that get the rest of the world doing it too. It's not that geeks get bored and move on to the "next big thing" - it's just that "the next big thing" is usually built by geeks, so they are inevitably the initial core user group. The real difference between mainstream and cutting edge is simply that the geeks doing mainstream stuff aren't as obvious as the geeks doing cutting edge stuff because everybody is doing mainstream stuff.
Think about it - email, the WWW, etc - once they were the sole province of geeks. The geeks built the next big things as well, but they didn't do it because they were bored and moved on, did they?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Topics:
Gas prices are high
Alternatives to gas
Linux is better than windows
Nintendo doesn't have a stable market
PSP sucks, DS sucks
MS does more stupid shitty things
Sound familiar?
"Geek blogging in decline."
Simple law of the survival of the fittest. Failure to breed leads to extinction.
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.