Ding, dong, the blog is dead…
Bruce Sterling has assembled some interesting thoughts on the future of blogging, from Thomas Purves:
There’s a flavourshift in the blogosphere. The olde flavour of blogging is leaving us.
When you think of it, (personal) blogs never really caught on anyway.
Compare this one data point, my blogroll: 21 my FB Friendlist: 249
Blogs as dead media. At least as we once (hardly) knew ye.
Blogs are for pros, facebook is for friends
blogs dead. long live blogs.
I’m not sure about this. I’d bet that people will be still be indulging in blog-like behaviour (publicly available text with more than 140 characters per post, in a diary format) in 50 years time.
There will also be private “friends-only” blogs, but I doubt one will displace the other. People blog for different reasons, and there will always be a sufficient supply of people narcissistic enough to imagine that complete strangers are interested in what they have to say, even if they’re not doing it professionally (irony!).
Then there is the idea of Lifestreaming, from Sarah Perez on Read Write Web:
Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.
…
The simplicity of a lifestream is ideal for our information overloaded age. Lifestreams are short and sweet, yet still provide the same insight into a person’s life as yesterday’s casual personal blog did. A video here, a photo there, and today’s web citizens can voyeuristically peer into anyone’s life and get a sense of who they are. Long-form bloggers, on the other hand (myself included) require time and attention to read, but with so many publishers out there, people just aren’t reading content like they used to - they’re just scanning text and moving on. For new bloggers, this means getting readers is harder than ever - your words are getting lost in a sea of noise.
Hence what Sterling means by blogging being “inherently unstable” as a medium - it exists for a few years before technological change mutates it into something else.
I still feel that old-fashioned blogs have a long way to go, particularly if you want to put a point across, or have an agenda, or want to inspire people to think deeply - rather than spray the intimate details of your everyday life over eyeballs in exchange for ad-revenues.
[story-coagulation from Bruce Sterling on Beyond the Beyond, specific stories from Sarah Perez on Read, Write Web and Thomas Purves on ThomasPurves.com]
August 6th, 2008 at 12:21 am
And here’s the evidence:
http://io9.com/5032973/the-best-and-worst-fake-american-accents-from-scifis-army-of-brits
What an entirely pointless blog io9 is. It gives “trivial” a bad name.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:29 am
They had a pretty decent smattering of literature and writing pieces in the early months, but they just don’t pull traffic like the media-sf list fluff, hence the focus on that. That’s economics for ya - they have a stable of pro writers on decent salaries to pay, after all. Whereas I can’t even pay for Futurismic’s fiction from the site’s ad revenue yet, so maybe it’s me that’s the fool. *shrug*
August 6th, 2008 at 1:29 am
Pro writers dreamt up that post on American accents by Brit actors? I suspect they’re paying them too much…
August 6th, 2008 at 4:58 am
You’re not thinking in terms of keywords and SEO, Ian; actors attract an amount of search traffic orders of magnitude bigger than authors can manage. And so it goes.
August 6th, 2008 at 7:27 am
It’s still possible to engage intelligently with a subject, without having “sf’s sexiest babes” or content like that. Um, I’m beginning to understand why I don’t read SFX…
August 12th, 2008 at 12:40 am
The sad part (irony?) is that this post should be read by all library leaders but will not since only a small minority see any value in the blogspace to begin with.