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rfmcdonaldLately, I've read and heard a lot of people talking about how Livejournal is dying. I'll be shallow and confess that I haven't noticed anything of the kind--look, I still have friends posting!--but if we're talking about one platform fading away for another, I can see that. Nothing's immortal: Remember Friendster? I never bothered. In Thursday's Financial Times, I came across an interesting article by the paper's FT Digital Business editor, Peter Whitehead, questioning whether blogging was not a major phenomenon but just a brief burst of energy, based on some recent statistics suggesting a lull in the blogosphere.
Whitehead was responding to an article in The Guardian, Charles Arthur's "The long tail of blogging is dying", in which he described how fewer real blogs were linking to The Guardian's website.
I can buy the idea that the era of hysterical speculation that the blogosphere can destroy journalism--well, at least in their current forms--is ridiculous. I can certainly accept the idea that maintaining a blog takes up a lot of energy and effort that most people wouldn't expend. I do see that a winnowing of the blogosphere is going on, perhaps most bloggers going on to investigate other methods and technologies while others keep trying to work at and improve the traditional format.
One thing that I didn't see either Whitehead or Arthur raise was the possibility that blogging is evolving, merging with other media technologies and spreading its basic techniques to other networks. What else is a Twitter or a Facebook update but a short blog entry letting readers know what they think about a certain thing or what they're doing right now? I know for certain that Facebook also provides utilities which allow everything from the storage and preservation of photos and video to the wave of very annoying game/meme posts which so dominated Livejournal during my first three years here. And sometimes the blogosphere can be brought into this directly: A Bit More Detail exists at http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com, yes, but not only can it also be read by other people without going to my site--through their Livejournal friends pages or through RSS readers--but it can be read by my Facebook friends thanks to a useful utility that imports my posts to that forum, links and photos and all. (Facebook also notifies people when I upload new photos to my Flickr account, too; good, good Facebook.) Facebook is just a really, really big version of Livejournal that can incorporate Livejournal (and Blogger, and Wordpress, and et cetera) alongside its existing blog features.
What is happening to blogging? With something like a quarter-billion reasonably active Facebook users, it's just changing; the old metrics need to be updated, and/or new ones installed, that's all. Nothing to see here.
[S]urely the activity of these blogs--let alone their present inactivity--has never been of any real consequence.
Apart from a very small percentage which are informative, original or entertaining, they have little or no value. They are vanity publishing, only made feasible by the removal of costs.
The fact that their creators appear to be giving up on them is hardly surprising, given the amount of time they take to write, to discover and to read. Only a tiny proportion of any working population has this time to spare.
Worthwhile blogs--and there are many of them around--tend, according to my own anecdotal evidence, to be linked to well-known organisations able to provide time and resources, or they have become professional concerns in their own right.
They are also now far more easily discovered, thanks to websites such as Twitter, which enable filtering and highlighting of links to relevant content, according to users’ set criteria.
Whitehead was responding to an article in The Guardian, Charles Arthur's "The long tail of blogging is dying", in which he described how fewer real blogs were linking to The Guardian's website.
[R]ecently--over the past six months--I've noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I'm defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or Wordpress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn't think we'd suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google's Blogsearch.
Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com--though it's still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it's a "retweet", echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest", which pointed to Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned".
I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn't been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier--and it's to easier things that people are turning.
I can buy the idea that the era of hysterical speculation that the blogosphere can destroy journalism--well, at least in their current forms--is ridiculous. I can certainly accept the idea that maintaining a blog takes up a lot of energy and effort that most people wouldn't expend. I do see that a winnowing of the blogosphere is going on, perhaps most bloggers going on to investigate other methods and technologies while others keep trying to work at and improve the traditional format.
One thing that I didn't see either Whitehead or Arthur raise was the possibility that blogging is evolving, merging with other media technologies and spreading its basic techniques to other networks. What else is a Twitter or a Facebook update but a short blog entry letting readers know what they think about a certain thing or what they're doing right now? I know for certain that Facebook also provides utilities which allow everything from the storage and preservation of photos and video to the wave of very annoying game/meme posts which so dominated Livejournal during my first three years here. And sometimes the blogosphere can be brought into this directly: A Bit More Detail exists at http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com, yes, but not only can it also be read by other people without going to my site--through their Livejournal friends pages or through RSS readers--but it can be read by my Facebook friends thanks to a useful utility that imports my posts to that forum, links and photos and all. (Facebook also notifies people when I upload new photos to my Flickr account, too; good, good Facebook.) Facebook is just a really, really big version of Livejournal that can incorporate Livejournal (and Blogger, and Wordpress, and et cetera) alongside its existing blog features.
What is happening to blogging? With something like a quarter-billion reasonably active Facebook users, it's just changing; the old metrics need to be updated, and/or new ones installed, that's all. Nothing to see here.
