"It is absolutely true that the old Sullivan-style – tens of posts a day, mostly excerpts and links, with regular essays in immediate response to ongoing news – is mostly over."
I'm having trouble finding a concrete argument in the article about what, if private content creation is indeed dead, is actually left to blog about. According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation.
Meanwhile, we're reading this on a blog. In fact, here on HN, we're reading blog posts all the time. It seems to me we consume a lot of essays which, shockingly, have not in fact been written by media companies.
I think what's changed about blogging has nothing to do with all that. Instead, it's all largely down to the fact that we moved from automated content aggregation to a human-powered filter. The death of the RSS reader itself was probably in equal parts due to an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio, context switching costs associated with using the app itself, and social media platforms swooping in as an all-in-one replacement. Google abandoning the platform might also have played a role, though it's difficult to discern cause and effect in this case. HN has replaced Google Reader for me, and I'm sure Twitter and Facebook have done the same for other people. But we're still consuming blog content at the end of the day.
HN is a poor subsitute for RSS. By definition, once something gets viewership on HN, it's no longer belongs to the long tail, the niche where RSS is the strongest.
I think you either 1) didn't read the whole article or 2) completely misread it. The point is the meat remains, even as all the excerpt and link stuff has mostly moved to Twitter.
> The point is the meat remains, even as all the excerpt and link stuff has mostly moved to Twitter.
I thought I addressed that by saying:
"According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation."
Update: I just realized you're the author of the article; I'm sorry you feel misrepresented, that wasn't my intention. I think my main problem is reconciling sensationalist statements like 'blogs as streams of regular essays are mostly over' with points that follow later on the basis of 'the meaty content remains relevant'. You might argue that I put the emphasis on something other than what was intended; maybe the central claim was 'link blogs are over', but in that case there would be very little need to have that particular discussion at all.
That was my only point. Sullivan type 40 post a day blogs don't make much sense anymore, but the entire premise of my article is that blogs still matter and can still be a business.
With regards to the automated aggregation vs human powered filter, I would assume email, messages, dm to be closest/most related filter borderline "filter bubble", i.e. human black-box vs white box filter...
what is the mix of sourcing for blogs/article one consumes each day?
I'm having trouble finding a concrete argument in the article about what, if private content creation is indeed dead, is actually left to blog about. According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation.
Meanwhile, we're reading this on a blog. In fact, here on HN, we're reading blog posts all the time. It seems to me we consume a lot of essays which, shockingly, have not in fact been written by media companies.
I think what's changed about blogging has nothing to do with all that. Instead, it's all largely down to the fact that we moved from automated content aggregation to a human-powered filter. The death of the RSS reader itself was probably in equal parts due to an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio, context switching costs associated with using the app itself, and social media platforms swooping in as an all-in-one replacement. Google abandoning the platform might also have played a role, though it's difficult to discern cause and effect in this case. HN has replaced Google Reader for me, and I'm sure Twitter and Facebook have done the same for other people. But we're still consuming blog content at the end of the day.