I disagree that the "blogosphere" is dead. The rise of TechCrunch, HuffPo, etc. have succeeded in increasing blog readership. The personal voices are still out there, are still part of the conversation.
Right. People keep saying this as if personal blogs are competing for some slice of a finite pie with TechCrunch. They're not.
Blogs, as people like myself who've been writing them for 5 years would define them, exist in greater numbers than ever before, and have greater readership.
I wouldn't characterize the "rise" of TechCrunch, HuffPo, etc. as part of the blogosphere. If anything, it's count-productive as those "blogs" are really now magazines that employ professional writers and they promote commodification and conglomeration of writers rather than decentralizing it.
A blogosphere -- an ecosystem of people contributing -- is hard pressed to be competing against 50 million pageview monsters like Gizmodo or 15 million pageview monsters like TechCrunch. As time goes on more and more people will tune in to those sites as it's simply a much easier way to keep track of information. You'll notice the trend on TechCrunch to gravitate towards more and more "mainstream" news and once an item breaks every other site has to cover it, even if they have nothing to add just for the sake of maintaining their audience. Like cable news.
It's why social media tools like Digg or Reddit or Hacker News are that much more important.
I get what you're saying, but it's not exactly a competition. There's more opportunity to find niche audiences now than there ever was before. Sure, numbers-wise something like Gizmodo or, say, Valleywag, will get more readers, but for every Valleywag there's a hundred Bynkiis and Angry Drunks and Uncovs. And News travels both ways: bigger blogs get their news tips from a lot of smaller sources, and those smaller sources very often get news from even smaller sources, and so on. Every blog is given the same freedom of press.
Ahh... for you see, it is a competition. It's a competition for time and attention. As the mainstream public -- quite different beasts than you and I, geeks and hackers, where we are obsessive with information -- turn to the Internet to consume content their time and attention is quite limited. Most times they will stick to only site or source that they like.
It's like community channels versus CNN. With blogging it's like we've lowered the bar for John Q. Public to get on TV and talk about their editorialization of the news, but, most likely people tune in to CNN for 30 minutes at a time. Why? Because it's professionally curated, edited, produced and digestible morsels that has developed a reputation over time. Talent will want to apply for jobs at CNN because they know that's where the audience is. Success begets success. The bigger blogs will only get bigger. Have more revenue from ads. Hire more writers and snowball.
Now here's the real question that people should be asking: is this a good or bad thing?
I, personally, don't quite know.
PS. As for you mentioning the linkage of big sites to smaller sites, I have a whole other diatribe about that and how it doesn't work from my experience working within the Gawker empire. But I'll save that for another time when I feel like having my karma points burnt.
I get where you're coming from. My question is: does it matter that the average person will read only one or two sites? Especially when social news sites provide a means of aggregating out to many sites rapidly?
On Hacker News, for instance, I get the occasional Seth Godin post. I don't like Seth's blog en masse, but one or two posts a week is decent for me. Other people, I'm certain, get Daring Fireball and Signal vs. Noise in similar doses, whereas I follow that more intently. And on Hacker News, at least, when I write something I want to share I've often had a pretty nice discussion following what I've written. And considering it's Hacker News, it means that the people reading it are all people I'm thrilled to have reading my stuff. That means that I, as an independent and an amateur, can reach people. Not millions of people, but I can reach the people I want.
Similarly, with politics there are independents like The Seminal that frontpaged reddit once every two weeks. I don't know how many hits that got it, but I'm guessing that meant a good deal of hits. Not the same as something like CNN, but not a completely meaningless amount, too. And that also means that people who like writing longer pieces, people that news stations wouldn't have time for, are given a space to write for the considerable audience that exists for more detailed work. And my generation is much more used to sifting information through several sources. It means that smaller venues will still find their audiences.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the big site-small site connection. If you ever do write about that, keep me informed: that kind of thing fascinates me to no end.
I totally agree, as I mentioned earlier tools like Digg/Reddit/HN are extremely important and beneficial for the "little guys" as it's an equalizer. Digg traffic are massive (about 350k pv worth depending on the interest), Reddit is pretty substantial (100k pv easily, again depending on interest).
So for your question: exactly, is the commodification of blogs to form major media businesses a bad thing for small guys?
Again, I'm not sure, yet. In the mainstream media world consolidation is a bad thing. In fact they fret about this commodification constantly as real journalists see it as an extremely bad thing. Dan Rather now heavily criticizes this about news agencies merging into just 3 or 4 major corporation worldwide http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o25T0BspJ7c. But then this opens yet whole other can of worms as mainstream media has a different type of burden: that of performing their duty as the fourth estate.
So to sum up: the trend started with people making tools for regular people to write and express and create content easier. Those "blogs" are now turning into professional media empires, hogging up attention and pageviews. For the rest of the blogosphere to exist it needs to heavily depend on tools like Digg/Reddit to filter.
Is blogging dead? Maybe. It's too early to tell.
I really should just stop being lazy and extend my comments on here into blog posts. Maybe I'll get a social media consultant job out of it.
I don't think blogging will ever die. It's extremely personal at its core, and there will always be small communities of bloggers writing only for themselves and the small community. (I'm a big Tumblr user, and I love having a network of about a hundred people with whom to interact. It gives me an audience and a feed of things I find interesting.)
Everything becomes "professional" eventually. But that doesn't necessarily kill off the amateur audience. And on the Internet, there's a MUCH wider scope than there is on TV. News agencies were local. Even small personal blogs are technically global. It means there's more fragmentation. Things like trackbacks help with that (I wrote an article criticizing a start-up, once, and the founder found my post through that link directly), though they're ugly and not universal (Tumblr doesn't support them, for instance). I'd like a more powerful system: that might be an interesting start-up idea, actually, figuring out how to broaden the perspective of the blogosphere.
As usual, Nicholas Carr goes on his big rant against what he deems blogs and the blogosphere. Ironically, his rant basically validates blogs as being ubiquitous now, and being embraced by both the average internet user and big publishing companies.
I don't understand how what you said is related to what he said.
His rant is that blogs have grown up and are run as businesses. This community of just random folks talking about something they have an interest in is cast aside for the TechCrunch and Gawker and HuffingtonPost professional publications. Those sites will attract more writers, more content, more viewership and monopolize more time away from the blogosphere.
The blogosphere is not dead. Just like I used to ignore "mainstream media", I now also ignore blogs that are owned by big media companies. The Internet is what you make of it -- if you just do what's popular, then you are only going to see popular things. Duh.
Yeah. And that's the big difference between the Internet and other forms of media. Anybody can have a say. Not everybody will have a huge audience, but at least they're allowed to talk, and the whole world is given the option of listening in.
i would be interested in rescuetime publishing aggregated user data, showing the fastest growing web destinations. i mean, if the buzz about blog has died, where are people going to instead? what's the hottest thing?
