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.'"
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 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
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.
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.