Slashdot Mirror
Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!
Carl Bialik writes "'Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging,' Jason Fry writes on WSJ.com, responding to a recent wave of blog-doubting that includes a Gallup poll and a Chicago Tribune editorial entitled, 'Bloggy, we hardly knew ye.' Fry says blogging might not fly as a business, but 'the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money won't mean the end of blogs -- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits.'"
I've learned this first hand: When my friend John Parsons and I started our baseball blog, Fear and Faith in Flushing, our moods used to soar and crash based on the "referrer summary" of sites that had linked to us. After a while, we noticed something odd: Our traffic kept increasing, even as our referrers held steady or decreased. Then we realized this was a good thing: Readers were coming directly to us instead of through intermediaries. Being part of a blog community is valuable, but it isn't everything. (If you're so inclined, read more about my blogging misadventures in this Real Time from October.)
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While some blogs are entertaining to read, the whole exercise requires readers to visit several blogs to get their daily required intake.
RSS-and-friends is not the answer because the burden is on the readers to seek out interesting logs, what if a blog is interesting one day and crap the other? What if there's another insightful blog pops out of nowhere today?
I wouldn't bother if I had to read 10 newspapers to get "good" national news in one, international news in another, sports in yet another so on and so forth.
This is where sites like Slashdot comes in handy, it's essentially a collection of interesting articles.
So some people have to get together to be the "blogeditors" and actively search for good blog articles every day, and readers have a place to go. It's like a selective RSS service.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Blogs are like assholes, they are full of shit and everyone has one.
Sounds silly to me!
If the ONLY Instant Messaging was among bloggers:
*ping*
Hi. what u doin?
*ping*
workin on my blog
*ping*
me 2
*ping*
i was jus gonna IM maurice
*ping*
maurice sez he's workin on his blog tooo
*ping*
kewl
*ping*
whaddya wanna do later???
*ping*
gonna download the new Wordpress
*ping*
cool. Im gonna write in my blog some more. Mind if I mention in my blog how i was IMing you today? I could even link to YOUR blog.
*ping*
That would be sooo kewl!
*ping*
kk
*ping*
kay. c u
*ping*
bye
*ping*
kay bye
Guess we need some more stakes. And garlic. Lots of garlic.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I mean, you didn't even bother to post a link to your blog!
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Every time a new Internet technology comes out that is a "killer app", industry tries to monetize it (it makes sense). See what I think's happening is that they looked at the Web and wanted to be able to do the same with every other technology, like IM and now blogs. These are new mediums in their own unique way. Not every medium can be monetized like the web or VoIP, or others. Some work, some don't. That doesn't mean that another generation of individuals won't eventually come up with a way. Podcasting is one that is struggling even like Blogs even though it is much less mature than the Blog (we haven't even come near the base of podcasting yet, let alone the tip). Eventually someone will figure this out... it may just take another "killer app" technology to turn it around. Patience I say.
Blogs aren't likely to go away anytime soon, only the hype will die down. All of the talk about blogging replacing traditional (ie commercial) journalism and people trying to make money doing it will thankfully go away. Indeed, I would guess that many people will continue to blog and then the next big thing will come along and the hype machines will glom onto that.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Blogs have always been overhyped and overrated. Who cares what you had for breakfast, or how someone cut you off in traffic today, or how you want to screw that cute new girl at work, or how your boss sucks?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Lots of people seem to assume that if something is popular, then they (or someone) ought to be making money on it. But it's the exception when that happens, not the rule. Humans have been hanging out and talking with friends for thousands of years. It's wildly popular, yet money needn't change hands for it to happen. Most blogs and IMs are extentions of this. Sometimes someone makes a buck on a banner ad, like a cafe owner makes a buck when friends catch up over coffee, but the bulk of the value is in the social exchange, and the buck is just rent on the venue.
The "blog", or something like it, will be here from now on.
People for the most part disconnected from their extended family and childhood friends. The Internet makes it possible either to stay connected with them or to find a new set of people with whom to connect, based not on heredity or geography but on common interests. Email and IM don't work for finding new people, only for data exchange with old ones.
Another feature of the blog is googlability. Say it once, and anyone searching for that thought can stumble into your take on it. That blows away legacy media, as radio and TV blew away whistlestops and soapboxes. Suddenly, it's not the financial power of your boss but the content of your message that's important.
The ramifications of that are just now being felt.
sigs, as if you care.
Blogs won't turn into profit directly. But there's indirect revenue in them.
:)
First of all, the obvious one. Content. Most of all, free content. Whether it's insightful or drivel, some paper will pick it up during slack season and patch together some kind of story around it because "XXX said in his blog".
Don't believe? You're reading Slashdot, right?
Then there's the not so obvious one. The network between blogs is information, too. Valuable information, actually. People show their interest in some topic, subscribe to blog-groups, you can track those people, trace their friends and what other interests they have. I.e. someone who's into A is also into B, and his friends are into C...
All for free. Just harvest it from blogging systems. And ad companies pay good bucks for that kind of info.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Money:
I think Google's model of owning blogger.com and then making an easy tie in for adsense allows them to fund hardware and sometimes pay bloggers to use the service. So I don't expect blogger.com to go away even if VC's aren't interested in funding competing sites.
Social:What I like about non-commercial blogs is that it reminds me of the really early days of the world wide web, where almost all pages were a person's personal site talking about their life and interests. Bloggs tend to be personal, and I like and value that aspect of them.
Think Deeply.
Oh, man, I gotta go blog about this right now!!!
Developers: We can use your help.
1. Blog
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Thank goodness
Real men don't write sigs
Nothing overheated and uninformed *EVER* goes away.
Like reality TV, blogs are cheap to produce, so they probably won't ever disappear, regardless how low the quality of the average example.
Personally I'm sick and tired of reading about blogs. I don't read any on a regular basis, as I haven't come across any that warrant my continued attention, although sometimes I find an interesting entry on a particular subject, and revisit that blog a few times. However I seem to read ten times as many articles about blogging (usually by bloggers) on sites such as this, and it's pissing me off. Let the effing bloggers blog to their hearts content, just stop talking about it already!
Oh no... it's the future.
Gosh, let's be clear - I am ready to read some really clever fellas blogs, I am ready to read how Radiohead records their new LP, I check out Linux/Free desktop devel blogs every day. And NONE of them uses any kind of ads. Because if you want to do blogging only for some kind of regular income, then there is clearly something wrong with you (hint: lack of common sense).
It was never ment to work, because stuff worth to read is already posted, for free. From guys who never intended to get money from it.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
But posting messages on websites will live forever!
is the Internet equivalent of self-important navel-gazing.
That said, the media loves to use the rise, fall, return template for many stories.
They'll do a bunch of stories about the great new thing (Java, microbreweries, politician running for president, whatever) then stories about their demise, and then stories about "hey we said they were dead but they're still around."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Blogs have always been overhyped and overrated. Who cares what you had for breakfast, or how someone cut you off in traffic today, or how you want to screw that cute new girl at work, or how your boss sucks?
Seriously, I hate reality TV more than most people, but for some reason they remain popular. Its basically normal people watching normal people and other than the fake drama I don't know what what people see in it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
...the other day that the only blogs I read are meta-blogs about blogging.
Is there any audience for blogs at all? Or are 99% of all bloggers shouting into the void?
Why does everything have to be profitable? Are we not yet in an era where tools are justified by their usefulness to mankind, not how much wealthier they can make an already wealthy man?
Wake me up in another 50 years, if there's still anything here worth hanging around for.. zzz
Hi
Find the real reason here!
You could have a wiki epitaph! Oh, that's not what you meant... - Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
So Barry Ritholtz is a blogger and hedge-fund manager who says blogs are fatal for an investment trend.
Blogs are small business so of course there's less potential for investors because blogs can have very low overhead and generate revenue immediately without requiring investment. This doesn't mean that blogs are on there way out.
It's "on tv" is what is important about it.
... yet they sell millions of CDs per album...
...
The actual people are just actors going by a script (anyone who thinks Reality TV isn't scripted needs to have their head examined). The fact that people find it "must see" is partially because they're sheep ready to be told what to think, see, listen, read and do.
People are different from one another in ways that matter to them. Sadly most people are very indifferent to a lot of things (values, rights, politics, taste, etc).
This is why McDonalds can sell billions of IDENTICAL burgers a year. And yes, I've been to McDonalds throughout the states and Canada, England and France and even Romania. They're all the same. Nobody cares for flare, they may make the remarks here and there but in the end they still go there.
Everyone laughs at lohan and the other pop titty stars
etc, etc...
For once I want to see a cross dressing right wing nazi gay rights activist playing american football in England while sipping a diet-caffeine free Jolt cola.
That'd be different.
To bring this OT
Blogs suck mostly because they're unoriginal. people "log" the bullshit in their life but can't write to save their lives and can't spin stories so that they're interesting. These are the sort of people that didn't get "short story composition" time in English classes during grade school.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"Reality TV" is an ego stroke, most people feel superior to the "characters" on those shows and watch it for that reason.
It's the same reason why people in the 19th century used to visit asylums for entertainment.
The article summary was unreadable. Is there an actual thought captured in there?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Look at just about* every "killer app" generated by the internet, and they all have the same characteristic: Nobody found a way to make killer money off of it.
Email, Instant Messaging, Blogging.
The fact is - if someone figured out a way to make money off of these killer apps, people would stop using them.
*(one exception - porn)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What do you mean everything isn't about money? Who'da thunk it?
... really. I was so used to just posting unusual URL, stories and such that for S&G when I deceided to do a family site makeover I just converted it to a blog. At first I was thinking I'd only use the blog format to keep it easy to update... and often. But as most addicts I'e been scouring random news stories. And I've actually had a couple positive comments, which has been nice. How a blog I laughingly called Living in the Whine Country ended up talking more about Tech and such... well it works for me. And this way I can get the release of passing on the interesting stories, and the couple regulars can take the spam on their time.
The bad part is that I registered a domain to link to the blog (since the domain name and the blog name did not match in any way) and then I realized that I talked only very little about the Wine Country. Oh well, now it's just explaining that all the visitors care only a little about family happenings and most are reading the tech or weird news.
oh and btw blogs are growing... and I do know a few people who make anough adsense and advertising dollars on it to be profitable... I'm just not one of them.
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
...why must something be profitable if it's popular? Isn't popularity enough for some things? In general blogs seem to serve only a few purposes:
1. Attention whoring
2. Sharing useful information that doesn't have a wide audience
3. Family brag pages
I don't see any of those being a "business opportunity". And I think anyone trying to turn a blog into a money making machine is a fool.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Blogs are like anything else; if it's someone who's insight is particularly good, you might pay to read it - or, I dunno, click on ads or something. If it's just some guy, then the blog probably isn't worth that much as a commercial tool.
.. or maybe not. :-)
Ask any columnist - it's pretty hard to come up with insight on a weekly basis people will pay to listen to. Hell, it's hard enough to get commentary modded up
..don't panic
I used to think all the postings I read were fake until this happened to me.
...
A cute new girl started working as my boss last week.
Sounds like Avenue Q got it right: "In volatile market, only stable investment... is porn!"
For once I want to see a cross dressing right wing nazi gay rights activist playing american football in England while sipping a diet-caffeine free Jolt cola.
That'd be different.
That was called Monty Python.
I know, they are weblogs or whatever, but who even termed these things into gimmicky little catchphrases. I remember back when I first heard the word I thought I had been left behind on the technology train, then I found out what it meant and I discovered I already had two. "Blogs" started out as just online diaries with random content, content often so random, in fact, that it wasn't worth saving in any other form (at least I find that to be the case personally). How do you expect something that is basically a child's journal with a URL to actually generate revenue? Face it, blogs are just connected journals, always have been, always will be. And how many people seriously make a buck off of a diary?
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
("I ate beets for lunch...lolz")
Uhm no i want information on space people. heh
I mean blogs were supposed to take over the world right? Well, some blogs are really good, but they are few and far between. I say if a group (like one im in) can hold a *real* irc room together on freenode and post blog entries about space at our leisure we are richer (not rich as in money...but richer in working together, and learning etc) for it.
If a person loves what thier hobby/interest is/are, and if they have dedication for years of posting things that recieve very little hits, in the name of getting a bigger story out, then they should do it.
Blogs are easy to start and hard to make good, imvho, and we have been trying for 2 years now.... But that is a-okay because we understand that making a living of off some uberblog is a stupid pipe dream.
All the hype is_just_that.
Blogs should be done because its something you love, about something you are passionate about, and not some money grabbing scheme.
Not for the $$.
D
Just my opinion, mod me sidways? :)
They just do. You can argue the case for keeping diaries, you know..traditional diaries as a means of self reflection, but "bloggers" are the saddest creatures on earth. Nobody wants to know what your dog ate for dinner, crackhead. Get a life already.
But I guess it's a good way to keep the not-so-intelligent people busy at home and not, for instance, committing armed robbery at the local grocery store.
"Did you say steak?"
"We're millions of miles from earth, inside a giant white face, what's impossible?"
From TFA: "-- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits."
God-damned American capitalist bullshit!
This guy and many like him think that if it does not make money or turn a profit, then it's not worth doing. HOGWASH!
This guy has NO idea where the Internet came from and obviously has NO idea where it is going.
P.S. I'm an American and LOVE America, it's just getting hard to defend these days...
that all blogs are about inane and irrelevant BS. This is not necessarily so. Two of my favorite blogs are written by mathematicians applying mathematics to various real world problems. It's illuminating, given that I've not used the math I got in college decades ago as much as I would have preferred. And another blog I read is written by a group of engineers and a college professor. Again, it contains such a wealth of data and references that it is like having an irregular portable classroom on that topic.
The problem is not blogs, but wading through the sheer number of blogs to find those that are truly worthwhile. Solve that and you might be able to make money.
Because as we all know, if it doesn't get venture capital, it's not worthwhile.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I think what we'll see is what we witnessed after every boy and their dog figured out how to create a HTML page complete with flashing text, awful animated GIFs and background MIDI music. As many have pointed out, nobody cares what Mrs. Rita Boddingworth of 42 Jackass Lane, Nowhereville did between the hours of 6pm and 10pm the night of February 17th or any other night, and so as the reality of this sets into the frenzied benign bloggers and they realize that their time might be well worth spent doing something more productive we'll see a drop in the number of redundant blah blogs just as the masses of Geocities pages died in the early part of this decade.
Blogging has however isn't all negative, it has created a useful paradigm for those people who actually have something useful and worthwhile to say. You can tell these people from the average blogger, while the person who uses this tool for good will probably post say once a week or less but when they post it won't be a rant which nobody gives a toss about and instead it will be some nugget of information which will probably help people out. On the other hand though, you have the other blogger who religiously jumps onto Blogspot or some other blog equiv of myspace and fills in the dreary details of their boring, insignificant life every single day down to the nth detail. Not that I'm necessarily ragging on the blogger here, as there's 6 billion people in the world and most of us lead fairly unassumingly dull lives, I just wish people would realize that most of us also lead the same life and thus have no need to read about it all over again.
Oh...one last point, bloggers as journalists.....please see some sense. That's like saying any monkey that can create a web page is a coder.....true, both can techincally code (something) but who are you going to employ to write software to control your car's safety features?
I took my updates page and turned it into a blog a year ago. I decided to write about specific things that weren't being discussed out there (Using humor and positive attitude to stave off depression, control ADHD, etc.) It's been hard getting noticed in all the din and roar but after a year I am seeing regular readers. It's rewarding, emotionally and intellectually, and the ads I feature bring in a bit of cash. But if I was doing this for money alone I would have quit months ago. $25 a month isn't a career! LOL
Blogging for me was always about honing my writing craft, learning to express myself articulately, and reaching out to people. I don't see myself abandoning this project because somebody somewhere decided that blogs were passé. I still have more things to say, and I have an audience that listens to them.
Perhaps the heydey of the political and tech centric blogs is passing. Maybe it's just a lull before the next election. Whatever metric the Chicago Tribune used to decide blogging was dying doesn't affect me or any of the other bloggers I know. We'll keep typing as long as there is somebody out there willing to read what we write, and I know some bloggers who don't even need that to keep at the keyboard.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
Japanese versus US blogs on Mutant Frog, a rather well-written but not too frequently visited, it seems, corner of the internet.
I suppose, if I were a proper blogger, I would have instead posted a link to my own web site where I wrote a short article that pointed to the one above...
"Podcasting is one that is struggling"
Seriously though...what makes a Podcast different from an mp3 recording stored on a server that can be downloaded to your player?
Blogs aren't going away. We all know it. Let's skip that point.
The idealistic notion that blogs would change the world in fundamental ways is going away. Right on schedule, too.
We've had enough pretentious books and conferences, enough heavily funded bad business models, enough fads, and enough hipster popularity contests. The only people who are going to suffer are those who have had too much invested (emotionally, financially, whatever) in that idealism: People who started blogs just to be cool or seem informed or to make money. People who wrote books saying things that will sound really embarrassingly stupid in five or ten years. People who really believed they would get Howard Dean elected on a wave of energetic typing.
This is, I think, how it should be. It's hard not to get swept up in the Next Big World Changing Thing, even when we can see the cycle repeat itself every few years. So hard that I think it's a fundamental part of our social nature. We want so much to believe that we can only change the world if we are part of some movement, some entity greater than ourselves with more power to affect change than any other force in the world. Invariably that runs into the immovable object of our own individual nature.
Every time around, we as a society and we as individuals learn something. What will it be this time? Time will tell. Maybe it's this: That when given a soapbox and the whole world as an audience, most of us don't have a whole lot to say.
The Blog Era is over. Now we can all look forward to the demise of the "Web 2.0 Era".
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
For so long now we've been hearing about the demise of traditional media -- especially newspapers and print, as their numbers have fallen right into the toilet. Constantly we hear from the media that the "blogs" and "internet" are to blame.
Then, for a while we heard a lot of reports from the media that came from blogs... rathergate and other headlines come to mind.
Obviously, the traditional media felt threatened by all these "blogs", because they no longer had the edge in the information game.
Then, the WSJ and Chicago Tribune both have stories about the end of blogs? Hmmm... call me suspicious.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
These stories are nothing more than the mainstream media panicking because they are losing readers to blogs. And what should they expect when they run official propaganda alongside human interest stories and fashion stories, the blogosphere is simply more interesting and informative.
Sorry, the word "Blog" always sounds to me like something you leave in the toilet bowl after a very large meal...