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Is Blogging A Dying Art? Part 1

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I was quite surprised to find out at last month's Web 2.0 Expo that the blogosphere's growth rate is declining. The latest "news" (or, someone's analysis -- I get a broken link when I try to get to the presumed source article at BusinessWeek) is that the number of blogs that are active has actually declined.

Margaret Kane, in "Another bubble bursts: blogs" (on the CNET News Blog), writes:

A new article in BusinessWeek says the numbers are pointing to a plateau in active blogs. The magazine is using stats from Technorati for the analysis, which found a decline in the percentage of blogs that are active compared to the total number of blogs tracked by Technorati.

It's a familiar pattern--millions of people got excited by blogging and set up pages of their own. But after a while, they grew tired of maintaining them--or moved on to newer social phenomena like MySpace or Twitter--and let their blogs go silent.

First of all, to call blogging a "bubble" seems somewhat strange to me. Bubbles typically are economic events, where novices are drawn into an activity because they believe easy money is available, and when their friends see them making "easy" money, they become fearful of being left behind, and so they jump in too, to avoid what appears to be certain poverty as a result of inaction. The ultimate result, of course, is a lot of poorer and wiser people. Except that they are then foolishly "wiser" and shirk all future genuine opportunity (which always involves risk) in the next decade or more...

I haven't seen the opening of blogging parlors, where people rush in and fill the terminals, paying by the minute to jump online and add posts to their blogs. You do remember (don't you?) the daytrading cafes that came into existence during the geniune late 1990s DotCom bubble -- providing access to the near guaranteed profits that trading the NASDAQ in 1999 and 2000 provided.

Comparing blogging to this, calling blogging a "bubble," is silly. It's only a bubble if expectations are wildly unrealistic and people with no innate interest in the activity are pulled into it by the lure of supposed easy and quick profit.

So, What Are We Seeing?

Several commentators (bloggers) disagree that blogging is slowing down. Some of them consider blogging to simply be morphing into multiple forms, which changes the meaning of the numbers Technorati is gathering. For example, is "twittering" a form of blogging? What about posting comments in MySpace?

Here are a few good posts about this subject:

I'm going to think about all of this over the weekend. Little did I know, when I wrote that quick post on April 17 over lunch with my wife, immediately after I'd attended David Sifry's address at the Web 2.0 Expo, that this would turn into such a "bubble" of heated discussion, reaching all the way up to BusinessWeek.

ttyl!

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

» Submitted by kevinfarnham1 on May 10, 2007 - 10:42pm.