

Who killed the blogosphere? - bhc3
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/who_killed_the.php

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bhc3
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.

~~~
alaskamiller
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

~~~
alaskamiller
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

~~~
alaskamiller
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

------
jamesjyu
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.

~~~
alaskamiller
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.

Where is the irony...?

------
jrockway
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

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markessien
What the 'blogosphere' needs is a service that takes a bunch of personal blogs
by several people, and makes a huffington post out of it.

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mtw
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?

