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Are blogs dead?
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 02/22/2006 - 14:50.
Blogs certainly have not caught on the way blog advocates thought. A Gallup poll says only 9% of Internet users read one regularly, and those numbers have not changed in a year. In Internet time, that's a very long time.
I have always been more interested in the technology that enables blogging, rather than the blogging itself. The weak link in blogging is the writing.
The fact that it is easy to blog does not automatically make us all bloggers. Good bloggers are good writers, have something to say, and are able to say it in a way that is of interest to more than their immediate family and friends (a very fickle audience at that).
But as blogging has become common, the tools to blog have also become much better, and are having effects on other parts of the Internet and the Web. It turns out blogging tools are perfect for newspapers, who usually have a few good writers sitting around drinking coffee, smoking, and chasing interns. More and more papers are finding out blogging tools are part of the answer to their question, "How do we move the paper to the Web?"
And almost anyone who maintains a Web site for community, civic, or personal use can do it better and with less effort using blogging tools, even if the site itself is, strictly speaking, not a blog.
Blogs are not going away, and the number of blogs will probably shrink to a number that is more representative of good writers, rather than who spent five minutes setting up a free blog site.
We still have only barely scratched the surface of how technology and the Web can enhance and improve community life. There is still much to do and many opportunities to pursue. Blogging and vlogging (video blogs) will play a part.
Are Blogs Dead?
Your analysis of the lack of Blogging participation strikes a cord with me. When blogs first hit the Internet, my spouse thought I would leap into blogging. I visited a few, but it turns out I don't have much to say, although I am an avid book reader. I find a blog is most pleasing to read when it is updated often, and that requires a big time commitment.
Blogs Dead?
I woonder if more and more newspapers are looking at blogs as material saying, "I need an idea for an article...let me see what so and so are saying."
Blogs aren't dead, people just don't know they're reading them..
I think way more than 9% of people online are reading blogs, they just don't know it. How are they supposed to know they're reading a blog? To the common person, doesn't a blog look just like a website?
I saw a similar study that showed that 2% of people that are online have heard of RSS. How many do you think have heard of POP3 or SMTP? Those happen to be email protocols. Everyone uses email, but barely anyone knows about the protocols behind them.
Blog tools are here to stay
I have to agree. I think there are several things going on that have made it very difficult to sort out what is really happening with blogs.
The hard core blogging community has consistently over-hyped the blogging phenomenon. A relatively small number of popular blogs that talk mostly about blogging have given the mainstream media the appearance that there is much more going on than there really is. As an example, the blogging community loves to cite statistics like, "A new blog is created every 2 seconds." I saw that in a talk just yesterday. But most of the time, the rest of the story is left out--numerous studies show that most blogs (perhaps as many as 90%) are dormant after just a month or two.
Conclusion: most "bloggers" don't have that much to write about and/or don't enjoy writing that much.
I also agree that most people are unaware that they are reading a "blog." More and more "traditional" Web sites are converting to the same kind of Web site tools used by bloggers, not because they want to blog, but because the tools make it easy to maintain a Web site, no matter what kind of group or organization you have.
These new tools are so good and so easy to use that in a few years, most Web sites will use some kind of "blog-style" system, for reasons that have nothing to do with blogging.
The real contribution of bloggers is that the phenomenon has accelerated the development and deployment of these new tools. And that's a good thing, whether or not anyone thinks they are reading a blog.