Has Blogging Jumped the Shark?
The Wall Street Journal says yes -- and no: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. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.
My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely -- and sometimes inaccurately -- to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening: One of the chief problems with some chronicles of blogging's demise is their confusion about definitions, a confusion that's mirrored in efforts to measure blogs' popularity or to say anything that can apply to bloggers as a group. There's a bubble, and you get the feeling (at least in the Virginia Blogosphere) that it's about to burst. As the number of blogs increase, people are only going to be able to digest so many, and readers themselves will sort out the wheat from the chaff.
I will be genuinely surprised if half of the current blogs we read are still active within the next three years. Like websites during the mid-1990's, everyone had one of those free deals from Lycos or Tripod, and it all vanished over time.
Considering that 90% of all blogs die out within a year, I don't expect the trend to improve anytime soon.
It's a very Neitzchean world when it comes to blogs: the strong survive the blogosphere, the weak are completely extinguished by it.
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J.R.Hoeft 
6 Comments:
I can unequivocally state that you are one of the strong! See you in a year!
But that won't stop some of us from soldiering on, eh, Shaun?
I imagine many others are starting to come to that conclusion.
4 1/2 years and still somewhat kickin'. Take that, natural selection!
NLS may finally offend too many people and RK and CC could cease being blogs and becoming political organizations. TC may have to quit his party. Republitarian could start a gossip column. But I don't think that will stop any of these bloggers from blogging.
I blog for fun and for discussion of ideas. I'm not going to stop. It takes a long time to go through my reader now, but it has replaced (to a certain extent) my reading of the WaPo and the RT-D, so I'm not spending that much more time gathering news than I did before.
Besides, the only reason why blogging might hit a bubble would be because Internet access stagnates. As more people come online, blogs will have a steadily increasing pie size. Unless Internet access flatlines, we're not in a zero-sum environment.
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