Why there is still life in blogs
Quite a few pundits have been speculating lately that blogs as we know them are dying. Nicholes Carr is just one of them. But is that really true?
I agree that blogging to some extend has gone mainstream with over 100M blogs created during these past few years. However statistics indicate that less than 2M of these are really active, so does that mean that we can still talk about a blogosphere as some sort of meaningful concept?
It’s a hard question to answer. Because a lot of the active blogs are not really interconnected. There isn’t so much real linklove going around, as we were once used to. A lot of people just write for themselves and with tiny audiences. Some are just link baiters, prostitutes with no real sense of love. And the A-listers are busy trying to turn their blogs into precisely the self-serving media empires they once made a point of putting down.
But still I think there is one or two characteristics left, which make it worthwhile to claim that there is still life in blogs.
First and foremost there is the feedback cycle. Blogs often come under attack for being less about facts and more about feelings than traditional journalism. But what the critics conviniently seem to forget is that there is immediate pushback on the stuff, you write on a blog. If you’re way out on your limp, your readers will tell you. In public. That’s the sort of self-regulating effect that’s characteristic of the blog.
Second, there is the ability to get the stuff - the thoughts, the analysis, the news - out there right now, as it happens. And this is perhaps where the true future of blogging lies? As a form of media where we trade of the completeness of the story with the speed of bringing the thoughts to market.
It will be interesting to see. Because to me this latter point is exactly where microblogging services enter the picture and provide value. So maybe it’s in microblogging - but still with an emphasis on the ‘blogging’ part that the real life is?
Vad NU! is a consultancy company owned by Mads Kristensen and specialized in helping clients take advantage of the business opportunities created by new media. Click to learn how I can help you and your company.
3 comments
Britannica Blog is tightly censored. Reader comments incompatible with Britannica’s commercial or ideological proclivities are excluded. As Carr suggests, “That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking.” A perfect description of Briannica Blog itself. Boycott Britannica censorship.
[...] Kristensen from Vadnu agrees. In his post ‘Why there is still life in blogs‘ he writes : I agree that blogging to some extend has gone mainstream with over 100M blogs [...]
[...] fulgt op og svaret på af bl.a. Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin, Mads Kristensen (Vadnu) og Helle Kruuse Nissen (eJour) og Martin S. Christensens mikroblogging artikel. Svaret er [...]
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