Mark Evans pulled a few threads together for me [Has the Blogosphere stalled] citing statistics that show blog growth leveling off. Mark thinks as “factor could be the explosive growth of MySpace and Facebook, which provide people with the ability to write and share their thoughts without setting up a traditional blog.” Ironically, Mark writes for a professional blog startup.
Absolutely. With every new media you have to consider, what does it obsolesce? If you think about, facebook and Social presence, it has to be killing blogging, especially the sort of casual/social bogs just read among friends. Facebook just does that so much better.
Scobble says twitter makes him a better blogger. (what do you think that means?) (I can’t remember o
At SXSW, Bruce Sterling (wonderfully)foretold the death of blogs. On his blog (heh), he explains a little further [SXSW Rant, death of “blogs,” etc etc] ‘there won’t be blogs around in ten years. There will be post-blog stuff. Megatons of crucial, important stuff. Just not “blogs.”‘
Amen, I’m ready for my post-blog. Blogs you remember, grew up a long time ago. At any rate, by the standard of internet time [which is like dog time but divided by 49]. First came the chronological structure, then comments, permalinks, trackbacks, innumerable sidebarwidgets and etc. were all crufted-on over time. And the blogs all work pretty well and a huge step forward vs the 90s web. But… as teh blogs are getting on, their finally starting to look a little… crufty.
Facebook and social presence apps/environments are incrementally* sapping attention from the bloggoshpere. Facebook is a walled garden, and twitter/jaiku are far from ready for primetime but these and the likes of b5 (I’ll call them post-blog too), and more and more interesting things you can do with rss, are agglomerating on the horizon.
“blogs that really interest me are not people blogging their web activities, they’re clearly platforms for developing something. They’re not simply: look at this, look at this, I saw this, I saw this… which is sort of like watching you get beaten to death by crutons” -Sterling
Blogs will evolve and specialize into whatever it is they are best at. In the meantime, other newer media will consume from the margins all those things that were probably not best on a blog to begin with (“when all you have is a laser – everything looks laserable).
Forget your personal or corporate blog strategy. Have you started to imagine your post-blog strategy?
*Longtime readers will know that in my own special way, what I like to lump in the general category of “Dead Media!” other, more reasonable (rational/boring), people might otherwise describe as “a subtle shifting in social emphasis”. But, for me, provocative definitions of “dead” and “media” always encouraged.
