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July 26, 2008
There's something odd about bloggers blogging that blogs are dead. Or dying.
Social Media Queen, Laurel Papworth, says the problem is that blogs are not collaborative, and collaboration is the way of the future:
The problem with blogs is they aren't collaborative. Yes of course it's possible to have a conversation. People can leave comments on your blog - the Dine In version. Or they can comment in their own blog post, linking back to yours (Take Out or TakeAway). Or a mashup of the two, by commenting on an RSS feed about your blog. But it ain't collaborative.
Like old-style media, blogs are one-to-many, and that just doesn't cut it any more. Blogs will not loom large in the future.
Trevor Cook thinks the blogosphere is losing the old community spirit of altruism and open access, and becoming a replica of profit-focused corporate media.
The original social media vision contains a radical sense of equality with everyone able to produce and consume content that is, in turn, valued on its merits, not its branding or the celebrity status of the author. But radical equality works best in small groups and the blogosphere has already outgrown it.
As social networks get bigger they lose their cosy clubbiness and can feel more like a business networking function where 'product pushers' keep crashing your conversations or snubbing you in favour of more popular attendees.
There is some truth in there. Think A-list, hit counters and various other devices for measuring 'success'.
Mainstream media blogs (flogs) get plenty of traffic and their authors get paid. Cook doesn't mention it, but the celebrity status of some op ed floggers has to be the main attraction for some readers. Look at me Mum, I'm talking to Andrew Bolt. A lot of commenting has more to do with star-frocking than discussion or debate.
Big institutions, business and government, seem to have no idea how blogs could serve their purposes. Business attempts generally fail, for various reasons, although the most obvious but least mentioned is that business operates on a whole other logic. There's no point talking with people if it won't make them buy more stuff from you. And they rarely understand the benefits of letting people publicly tell them why they're crap.
Any serious attempt by governments would have the same problem. Imagine the average response to a government blog seeking public feedback on the ETS? Or anything else for that matter. It would be troll heaven.
Personally, I don't think blogs are as dead as all that. The euphoria and utopianism has subsided, which was inevitable, and there's no way blogs will ever meet the advertising and mass communications needs of big institutions. But as we saw during last year's election, there are times when people need somewhere to talk about stuff that matters to them. Blogs aren't dead yet, just settling down and figuring out what they want to be.
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Lyn,
yes there has been a large down turn on blogs. Mostly I would say on the attention span group.
The best judge I would say would be the posting of current blogs as this separates from the inactive blogs. Technorati gauge this but Google wont.
And then too it would be important to track overall comments on all blogs that were active. I would put comments at 25% of a year ago.
Yes so I surmise that Blogging is becoming MORE intelligent