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CATEGORIESDo Blogs Still Matter? – Topic of the Week
August 27th, 2006Not to go all Lester Bangs on you, but are blogs dead? Before you scoff, hear me out: Yes, we are clearly in the age of the digital community, user-generated content, etc. etc. Blogs are on the agenda of every web-related conference, and those who run websites are all talking about blogs and what they mean for the future.
We, however, the UX community, the early adopters, the geeks, have known about blogs far longer than the masses. When we first started posting and reading blogs, the blogs we read and wrote *mattered*. They were a new, unique voice, something different than the world has ever seen. They spit in the face of traditional sources of news, media and entertainment. Now, with the establishment of myspace, facebook, blogger, etc., it seems that almost everyone has a blog. The result is an oversaturated market where a blog cannot stand out as that new and unique voice. (At the very least, a blog will have to be extremely unique to stand out — launching one that reviews maintstream music, for example, and expecting to compete with Rolling Stone, just won’t work. But if you blogged exclusively about the reggae music scene in Richmond, VA, well, then you might have a fighting chance to exist in a niche.)
As a blog writer, I find it frustrating to keep going, because there are so many other options out there. How do I differentiate myself and convince you to read my blog over all the others out there? If enough people start feeling that way, will many blogs start to go away?
I’m also thinking about corporate blogging, i.e. blogs on corporate or retail websites, and what that means for the blogging community. At the recent eTail Multi-Channel Retailer Conference, one of the speakers pointed out that although it seems every retailer is interested in and talking about blogs, only about 5% of retailers actually have them. It seems that while everybody is interested in the idea of using a blog to promote a company, few have decided to invest in it. This is actually somewhat encouraging to the future of blogging as a whole, as corporate blogging sort of misses the original point — which was always about regular people providing alternative content for web users to consume. If CNN blogs, it is still news from CNN, just in a slightly different format.
Lastly, what’s next? Eddie James is convinced video is the wave of the future, but I wonder if home movies will have the same appeal as the written word (it seems easier to write something compelling than to produce a quality video). Is there something that is just starting to develop that will be the next “blogging”?
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I think that the virtual cacophony of blogs that we are seeing now compared to ‘97-00 is a logical progression of the medium and totally natural as we, as a society, move online.
I foresee a future where most people will choose media vehicles (or a mix of) to represent themselves in cyberspace. In the beginning, it was .txt files on Gopher. Then it was HTML. Then blogs hit the scene, and with their relative ease of entry for the nontechnical, they exploded. Now, after the miniboom of audio podcasts, video is exploding. What I’ve seen with each wave is a crest of adoption where everyone wants a go, then eventually a large group gets bored or distracted by the “next thing” and moves on, leaving a certain group to remain.
And I think it’s relevant that “blogging” is really just a word for simplified web publishing, and that it is upon this platform that many people publish their video, audio, and other digital media – we’ve even invented terms to pigeonhole them by genre like “vlogs” and “plogs” (video and picture blogs, respectively). I think your entry assumes “blogs” to be primarily text but I see blogs as far more yet less – just an easy way for an untrained person to get their content on the web.
The web enables us to access the entire blogosphere through a click, a truly unique human experience that we’ve really never had before. In the past, the nontechnical folks were kept out of the space by the knowledge barrier and a dependence upon coders to get their ideas out there. Now there’s no barrier so the web is seemingly overrun with blogs. It’s like the blog reader is floating above a massive anthill trying to distinguish the ants from one another, but really can’t differentiate any of them except the exceptional – the ones carrying bits of food. These bits of food are the unique content, the original ideas, the natural talent and the surprising approaches. These are the things that will differentiate some blogs from the masses.
Truly, blogs are beginning to become representative of the population, and, sadly, much of the population doesn’t have anything particularly original to say, much less every day. Many bloggers depend on the echo chamber to keep their momentum going. For my part, I quit blogging in 2002 because I realized that my content wasn’t original enough to merit the kind of readership I wanted. It was a tough decision, because I thought I was an original guy with a good head on my shoulders, but more people had more time to devote to blogging and I chose life in reality over life online.
I think a lot of people will make this choice as they realize that they’re just drops in the online ocean, but this won’t be the death of blogs, it will be the new renaissance of blogging.
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[...] What worries me about this is not unlike the concerns I expressed recently about blogs — will the commercialization of these sites render them obsolete? The great thing about MySpace is that individuals are able to publish their thoughts and opinions, hook up with other like-minded people and have a place on the web to call their own. Sites like YouTube and Flickr flourish because the content is generated by average people, not companies, and as such it is fresh, interesting and exciting. If, on the other hand, every other MySpace page becomes a company promoting some product or agenda, or it becomes harder to find videos on YouTube that were uploaded purely for entertainment and for no other reason, these sites will lose thier cool, and thus their audience. [...]