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.
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.