Has blogging peaked?

The latest fad is to claim that blogging has peaked or is even tanking.

Like the Internet, blogging has been over-hyped and is now suffering from an excessive reaction to these exaggerated claims of 'revolution', 'death of media', 'death of PR' etc.

In my view, blogging adds another dimension to our media environments. A dimension of participation and diversity of voices that was rarely, or hardly, possible before.

But there are still limitations; not everyone wants to participate, or has the time; only half Australia's population has regular internet access; while everyone can be a publisher in theory in practice only a small percentage of the population will ever have the desire and tools to do it.

Still that small percentage adds up to many millions of people and that's a lot of publishers but it doesn't add up to 'big' audiences for any but a tiny few. So only a very few bloggers are going to find this self-publishing an attractive business activity.

Jason Fry has a good summary and analysis of the various aspects of this issue - WSJ.com - Real Time.

Blogs will be everywhere in the near-future, but singling them out amid the Internet tumult will seem odd, like talking about one's favorite commerce or community sites as a group. Media companies will use blogs to track fast-moving stories and bring some much-needed attitude and voice to their brands. Corporations will use them for updates and conversations with their own employees or customers. A handful of blog empires such as Gawker Media will create new ones regularly, building brands around the hits and shuttering the misses. And yes, lots of people will build their own blogs to issue family updates, share political views or offer their own thoughts on life. (Some of them will even attract loyal readers, more exposure and make a little money.) And I hope Greg and I will still be demonstrating we're the planet's most-insane Mets fans.

But blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they'll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation. That may feel a long way from the claims of blogging's first heady days, but then that's the way most such things turn out: Wikis aside, today's Web looks very little like Tim Berners-Lee's original idea for a kind of digital whiteboard. Blogging is easier, faster and more conversational than traditional Web publishing, but that doesn't change the fact that relatively few people actually yearn to be publishers. Nor do they particularly care what category the things they read fit into, or what technological tools produced them. That may not sound like the stuff of revolution or VC riches, but it also doesn't sound like a fad or a failure.

Comments

[Richard Bailey]

Each new medium has always been additional. Broadcasting didn't kill print; TV didn't replace radio etc. Blogs may be here to stay, but they were only ever a return to Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the collaborative web (no more, no less). There has certainly been too much hype.

[John Cass]

Trevor, I hope blogging's crest has peaked because if blogging is anything like the search industry. Then the industry will go from strength to strength in the years to come. We may have reached the peak of the first phase of blogging. But as cultural adoption increases with personal publishing you will see more and more people publish their own sites. This conversation about peaking reminds me of the stories in the news in 96-98 about the web and ecommerce.

[Trevor Cook]

John, maybe with the froth off a little we back to something more sustainable. It is like the days when people were saying that all or most shopping was going to be done online

[John Cass]

I agree, we also don't want to see too much of a bubble. Hopefully we learnt something from the last bubble bursting.