JustinFlood.com

Get over it. The blogosphere isn’t dead, just different.

There has been much kvetching and flapping of lips to the fact that Blogging has become a dead art.  I’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again.  It’s not dead, and it’s not going anywhere.

What has died is the intimate level of conversation that used to be so prevalent in the blogosphere between a writer and a reader.  With millions of blogs on millions of sites, many of the bigger ones run by large corporate entities,  it’s only natural that the intimacy has faded.  There’s simply too much noise.  But blogging as a whole has gotten stronger.

Blogs are democratizing in a way that few things in the past have.  Anyone with a good idea and serviceable writing skills can go out and make an impact on people.  This blog by itself has proven that.  I started writing simply because I wanted a place to jot down cool ideas I’ve had, and comment on the goings on of the tech industry.  Now this has grown into a site with well over 10,000 unique visitors per month and has shown no sign of slowing.

I’m not corporate backed, and the ads only pay for my hosting and domain, but I still write anyway, simply because I can.  If you’re in this for the money and you aren’t bought out by a large corporation,  you’re in for a big shock.   Blogging on it’s own isn’t a terribly good money making endeavour.

That doesn’t mean that your ideas and writings won’t affect other people, or cause you to grow a small but loyal base of fans.  If you’re good, those will come with the territory.   Not to mention the fact that consistent quality writing will likely lead to other opportunities that you could have never seen coming.

Indeed, most bloggers simply can’t cut it in this rough and tumble medium and simply give up.  A great article on Nicholas Carr’s blog shows that very clearly:

It’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of blogs have been abandoned. Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent “state of the blogosphere” study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they’re a whole lot lower than we’ve been led to believe. “I find those numbers shockingly low,” writes Bray; “clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought.” Call it the Long Curtail: For the lion’s share of bloggers, the rewards just aren’t worth the effort.

I’d say those numbers aren’t as bad as one would believe.  What percentage of Myspace pages are abandoned?  Facebook pages?  Twitter accounts?  Flickr accounts?  Photobucket accounts?  E-mail accounts?  AIM screennames?  My point is, that like most things online,   people try them for the hell of it,  and a lot of the time,  give up.  Failure is the natural selection of the Internet.  It weeds out the bad and useless,  leaving more room for the good ideas of those who persevere to float to the top.

Nicholas Carr compares Blogging to Amateur Radio, which I think is a fair, if incomplete comparison:

Back in 2005, I argued that the closest historical precedent for blogging was amateur radio. The example has become, if anything, more salient since then. When “the wireless” was introduced to America around 1900, it set off a surge in amateur broadcasting, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the airwaves. “On every night after dinner,” wrote Francis Collins in the 1912 book Wireless Man, “the entire country becomes a vast whispering gallery.” As amateur broadcasting boomed, utopian rhetoric soared. Popular Science wrote, “The nerves of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one.” The amateur broadcasters, the historian Susan J. Douglas has written, “claimed to be surrogates for ‘the people.’” The democratic “radiosphere,” as we might have called it today, “held a special place in the American imagination precisely because it married idealism and adventure with science.”

But it didn’t last. Radio soon came to be dominated by a relatively small number of media companies, with the most popular amateur operators being hired on as radio personalities. Social production was absorbed into corporate production. By the 1920s, radio had become “firmly embedded in a corporate grid,” writes Douglas. A lot of amateurs continued to pursue their hobby, quite happily, but they found themselves pushed to the periphery. “In the 1920s there was little mention of world peace or of anyone’s ability to track down a long-lost friend or relative halfway around the world. In fact, there were not many thousands of message senders, only a few … Thus, through radio, Americans would not transcend the present or circumvent corporate networks. In fact they would be more closely tied to both.”

It’s a fairly good statement to say that blogging in general will likely be more and more absorbed into the main-stream media, leaving independant bloggers a bit fewer and farther between.  But unlike amateur radio, which has all but died today due to licensing and equipment costs,  independant blogging will always be around.   All one needs is a modicum of technical and writing knowledge and a website like Blogger or Wordpress.com to host a blog for free.

Even if in these tough economic times, sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger start paid models,  it’s easy enough for one to pay $10 for a domain, and $3 a month for enough webhosting to host all but the biggest of blogs.  This is simply not a medium that will die as easily.

The concept of blogging in one form or another has been around far longer than it’s own name.  Even back in the days of Web 0.5 BBS systems, and Web 1.0 static homepages, people have been using the internet to get out their opinions, and thankfully the open and uncontrollable nature of the internet will allow that to happen for a very long time in the forseeable future.

Like anything else,  the mediums evolve but the message remains.