Yesterday, Crikey included a bizarre piece in its subscriber email which argued that blogging was in decline and would soon go the way of CB radio. Of course, no facts or evidence was supplied to support this hopeful notion.
What most realise is that blogging is the illusion of connection, publishing into a void and thus doubly isolating. Those blogs that survive will and are evolv(ing) into multi-person sites, some with collective and decentred ways of uploading, others with hierarchies essentially identical to paper editing.
Like I said no evidence was given for this predicted demise of the stand-alone bloggger. And I don't know who the 'most' referred to in the above quote are.
The author of this piece would do well to look at the latest report from Dave Sifry which shows that the blogosphere is still doubling every six months and technorati is now monitoring over 50,000 posts every hour, interestingly more of those posts are now in Japanese than in English.
The numbers of Australian blogs are also increasing (and will do better when the broadband situation improves in this country).
And with continual improvements in networking technologies like RSS and OPML the networking in the blogosphere is getting stronger.
Of course, blogging can be seen as a competitive threat to crikey, so maybe its more wishful thinking on their part than anything.
One of the more bizarre reports that they've included in their emails.
If there's anything for anything dying I would have thought it'd be email newsletters with the rise of RSS.... Hmmmmm :-)
Posted by: Darren | 09 May 2006 at 05:54 PM
Spot on there Trevor.
It smacks to me of bitterness that their business model is quickly becoming out-dated.
Posted by: Martin | 09 May 2006 at 06:26 PM
It is always the way of the former powers that be to fight tooth and nail over the new one emerging.
Oh sure someday there will be some type of blog "shakeout," all industries go through this. But it is here to stay for a long time, and even after a shakout it will be much stronger.
Posted by: Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com) | 10 May 2006 at 03:33 PM
Hmmm... not that Crikey has ever a) got it wrong, or b) taken criticism and threats well.
Ah well, if this bastion of intelligentsia journalism predicts the demise of blogging, I'd best put my blog up for sale -- any bidders?
Posted by: Lee | 10 May 2006 at 09:39 PM
I don't agree with the central concept that blogs are dying. But I do think that multiple author blogs can be more successful.
Posted by: John Cass | 11 May 2006 at 08:27 AM