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.'"

Comments

First hand experience

[FST]

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.)

Re:First hand experience

[koweja]

Blogs are great for organizational news; we use them at work a lot for staff communication. We have a lot of people that work a wide range of hours, so our blog has replaced having to email everybody in the office to share news. Keeps our inboxes clean(er) and makes it easier to archive and search old messages.

The problem with blogs is that there are 10 million morons who think that they have something intelligent to share and that their ramblings is a good replacement for actual local, national, and world news. Because of this the percentage of blogs that are crap is fairly high, but blogs are still a very useful tool.

As for blogging fading away, it's expected that the number of blogs/bloggers will plummet. It became the trendy thing to do, so a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and made blogs just to join in. Once the fad start to fade, most of these people will lose interest and find another trend to follow. However the people who actually have an interest/need for blogs will remain. So, it's not that blogging is dieing, it's that the size of the blogging community was unnaturally high and is now simply fixing itself.

One-To-Many the wrong way

[biocute]

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.

Blogs aren't dead?

[Shadow Wrought]

Guess we need some more stakes. And garlic. Lots of garlic.

Only The Hype Will Die

[blueZhift]

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.

Re:Only The Hype Will Die

[Lispy]

Call me ignorant. Back in 2002 I was called to a meeting with some pretty important guys in the company I was working on back then as they wanted to have one of the "tech guys" in that meeting too.

So I sat there and they were talking about that hip new thing called blogs. That was the first time I heard about that phenomenon. The whole time I was trying hard to gasp the concept behind all this but whenever I thought, ok where's the meat, it turned out that in the end they were simply talking about people writing about stuff on their own homepages. I was like, WTF? This is the whole POINT of the web! I mean, c'mon, isn't it? Wasn't this hyped 1993 or sth.? What were YOU thinking the information super highway is all about? Were you just unfrozen from carbonite or what?

When I was finally asked on the topic I said something how I am turning to "blogs" (I used it like I had known all the time what it was) everday whenever I surf the web. They were thrilled. It was like it was 1995 all over again and someone told them that it was POSSIBLE to distribute stuff from your desk to the whole world. I was just wondering, WHAT in the world had they'd been thinking the last 7 years was all about?

Am I still missing the point or is this just as fundamental trivial as it seems?

Should be no surprise.

[davburns]

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.

Blogs are a permanent feature

[RealProgrammer]

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.

Two Thoughts: Money and Social

[olddotter]

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.