The Rise and Fall of Blogs 433
i-Love-to-blog writes "Blogs have revolutionized information delivery. They not only made the world much more smaller, but a lot more personal, united and un-afraid as well. Events like the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion made news channels take a back seat. Wired claimed blogs to be what Napster was to music. They even have a wager on Weblogs outranking the New York Times Web site by 2007. People got paid to blog. Then they got fired for that. Some lost money for blogging their ideas. Most just hand out links these days. When was the last time your favorite blogger talked sense? Have blogs reached a saturation point? Blogging burnout is a humorous look at the rise and fall of weblogs."
Blogs aren't going anywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a shocker.
Maybe next they'll take reality TV off the air. Nah, that's probably a bit much to hope for.
I don't have anything against the idea of blogging (I recently set one up myself), but my opinion is that it should be kept as professional as any good magazine. Once that professionalism is breached, it becomes nothing more than a massive IM topic.
if a blog falls in the woods... (Score:2, Insightful)
a) very few people would notice
b) even fewer would care
Honestly. (Score:3, Insightful)
I honestly don't see the point of an online diary. A diary's something you write in a lock up, not post online for the world to see - and if these kids can funnel this kind of energy into writing shitty blog entries, why the HELL can't they at least learn to write with proper grammar and spelling?
Blog = Personal webpage (Score:5, Insightful)
Even companies are jumping on the "blog bandwagon" by starting "personal blogs" of their upper management. For what purpose, I cannot ascertain, except probably as an advertising avenue.
I hate it when CNN or some major news channel reports "happenings" from the "Blog world" or "Blogosphere" and waste my time, the viewers' and their own....time that could be better spent on reporting something worthwhile (not that they would anyway).
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blog (un)Accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
On
I am NOT claiming that print or video media is better. Once a story gets in a newspaper, it quickly becomes fact. I am also NOT claiming that the public is incapable of having accountability. Look at Wikipedia. There is plenty of accountability with peer oversight. Blogs, on the other hand, do not have any oversight. They don't have to get past an editor or fact-checker. Then, the general public is too lazy to check the facts. You end up with a large group of people believing some idiot's blog-rant to be fact.
I think that is truly it for me - idiots becoming dumber by getting their facts from bigger idiots.
1,000,000 Monkeys (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogs change the publishing path, but changing the path doesn't make the content any better. Blogs have enabled people with something intelligent and relevant, who didn't have a way to before, to get themselves heard. Unfortunately it has also allowed a lot of people with nothing to say a way to spew more junk for everyone to filter.
Changing the medium doesn't automatically make better content.
*That* is wishful thinking (Score:2, Insightful)
I highly doubt that. There are billions of people on the planet that have never read a blog and have absolutely no desire to, but they still get 'traditional media.'
To say that traditional media will just fold if they don't adapt to blogs is.. well, a rather typical self-serving blogger thing to say.
A somewhat relevant example is that the MPAA/RIAA hasn't gone away yet. They haven't adapted to the new situation, but they're still wielding a mighty sword.
The traditional media isn't going to go away, no matter what bloggers think. The two will exist in their own realms, appealing to the appropriate audience, if anything.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lord, I hope the majority are leaving the Internet. What your cat did today is not news for the entire world to hear. Nor is your diary-online. While a lot of people get a kick out of such Voyuerism, the rest of the civilized world doesn't really want to hear about it.
What we do want to hear about are intelligent thoughts on current issues, professional quality articles, "man on the street" information from hot areas (e.g. Iraqi bloggers), and other very USEFUL types of information. These bloggers are hopefully not going anywhere.
Point of blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
Blogs are just a way for someone to avoid the confrontation of dealing with it in real life. You can talk about that girl you like...and you know she's going to see it because you have the link in all your profiles. You can finally say what you really think of that jackass who picks on you because a friend of a friend will let him know the link. And of course the "OMGLOLBBQ!!!!111ONEHUNDREDELEVEN!!".
I have had an online dear diary that none of the real-world friends know about. Online friends do because they're removed from the situation and as long as I give an unbiased description they can give unbiased advice. That whole "ohhh I hopehopehope she reads this because it's in all my profiles and I announce to everyone when I update it" is a bunch of creepy, insecure crap.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, I got ubuntu running on the machine by netbooting the installer off my lan, than installing over the internet. Not bad for a machine with none of the regular routes open for installation.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical American outllook (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Occasionally, a blog will truly break news. Will that news continue to get extra airtime in traditional media because it came from the relatively novel source of a blog?
For the mass of purely opinion blogs, will they become like op-ed pages, or be marginalized as the opinions of nobodies?
So they're not going anywhere. There will be more and more of them. They'll get less and less play in news stories titled, "Hey! Did you hear that there are things called blogs?" The question will be how important they are.
My guess is, not teribly. Most bloggers are under-informed and lacking in insight. Those who are well-informed and insightful may get picked up by major media. Or a new medium may form to attract attention to "major" bloggers: advertising, support, perhaps even pay. Occasionally a new one will attract attention without that, and they'll fight with the older bloggers, whom they'll accuse of being "establishment".
In other words, same sh*t, different medium.
Re:Blog = Personal webpage (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, everyone thinks their inane self-indulgent ramblings are important, or worse yet, "journalism".
Re:Journals and blogs (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell it to the Wall Street Journal and the journalists who work there.
KFG
The day the Internet died... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Honestly. (Score:5, Insightful)
What would we give to get semi-daily commentary about personal problems and day-to-day events from the 1800s? (Answer: a lot. A LOT)
People forget that big events are pretty well documented in history, but we loose the ephemera all too easily. Personal blogs are ephemera to the extreme.
Re:Over-time (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Please no. I have enough to do just to keep up with the torrent of email I receeive every day. A business orientated slashdot? Ive kidna done that(a local company usenet server... happens in a lot of tech companies). Ive rarely seen them used for any particularly productive purpose. Mainly used to ask people when/where they are going to lunch and post links to amusing flash animations/games.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your friends (both of them!) might be quite interested in reading it, though...
While a lot of people get a kick out of such Voyuerism, the rest of the civilized world doesn't really want to hear about it.
Just because everyone can read it, it doesn't mean that everyone will read it. One of dot-bomb-boom's little lessons :7
What we do want to hear about are [..] etc. You know, i'm not really sure that's what we want to hear about. Thats something you want to hear about and -- to a lesser extent -- what i want to hear about (i do not really care that much about politics), but there's millions of people out there that don't really care that much about "useful" information, yet are more interested in, say, your cat's personal life. And these people are not ever going to leave the internet. It is quite likely, though, that personal blog craze will eventually pass (just like the fad of contentless personal homepages) and make way for more community-oriented services.
Is variety so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never really understood this sentiment. Blogs aren't like TV. They're not pushed to you. If you like someone's "What Scruffy the Cat Did Today" blog, you can grab the RSS feed and get your daily dose of Scruffy amusement. But if you don't like it, it's not like there's nothing else on the Internet.
The beauty of the blogging medium is that what you read is up to you. You can go with soley corporate-sponsored blogs. You can read obscure rants from marginally intelligent blogs that have only three readers. You can concoct your own mix. However you choose to make use of blogs, the tremendous variety of thoughts, opinions, and stories is what makes the phenomenon so powerful.
I'd hate to see blogging become just another means of obtaining pre-vetted "useful" (as defined by whom?) information from the usual sources.
I'm not going to be reading the Scruffy the Cat blog any time soon, but I'm happy it's out there.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ordinarily I am a fan of pedantry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Blogs can serve a purpose other than "useful" information: private communication. A large percentage of blogs (see: most Xangas, most LiveJournals, etc.) exist for small communities to interact with one another, not to be a "news" source.
For example: my blog probably doesn't say anything interesting to you, but it provides my friends and family with a way to keep track of what I'm doing, at their own leisure, rather than getting bombarded with emails.
The internet is not only a news/reference source. It is also a means of communication and entertainment. Not everything exists to serve your unique set of interests.
(How did the parent get modded +5 insightful for what amounts to nothing more than a personal pet peeve? (Might as well say goodbye to my post, because I obviously disagree with the moderators.))
Re:Point of blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
That may be one very small aspect of blogs for some people, but I think that you've made an unnecessarily large blanket statement based on that fact.
My LiveJournal serves many purposes for me:
I could continue, but I think I've made my point clear. I don't expect anyone to read my blog and it amazes me that I have the readership that I do (my LJ friends of list sports approximately 450 people); those who aren't interested simply don't have to investigate.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. I don't know about anybody else, but despite what the original article post says, I was pretty glued to my local news channel on 9/11 (here in New York). Is anyone actually going to sit there and tell me in all seriousness that their primary source of news and info on 9/11 was somebody's blog? Hell, if you were in a safe enough place to sit and blog about it, then you just weren't close enough to even know what was really going on.
Blogs are a terrible source of news, IMO. They are a better source of opinion, maybe, and for bantering about things like the latest gadgets [engadget.com], but anyone who's either sitting at home typing up a bunch of crap or worse, simply posting a bunch of links to some other "real" news site, is not doing anybody much good at all. And even for opinion, they really mainly exist for those who want to have their egos stroked by finding others whose opinions simply help confirm their own...
I read blogs, and I write one too (when I feel like updating it, which isn't often). But they're hardly a replacement for traditional news. The whole blog craze reminds me a lot of the dot-com era, where everybody thought these small little online startups were going to come in and sweep the big, old, crusty traditional companies out of the way... Then reality set in. The same thing's probably going to happen with blogs. Does that mean blogs serve no purpose? No - I mean, technically, Slashdot is a blog. Engadget is a blog. Gizmodo is a blog. I read these multiple times per day.
But for real breaking news, and for real informed opinion, there is no way for blogs to compete with traditional news media. After all, you generally at least need a college degree to get a job in the news industry - I'm not sure how much you can trust your average high school dropout with access to a PC and a free blogger.com account. (Of course, traditional media's had its own share of problems the past couple years, but then that's partly because they're actually held to some sort of ethical standard. Blogs are not held to any standards whatsoever, and any blogger can get away with pretty much anything they want, however erroneous or borderline slanderous their statements may be.)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
My sig contains a link to my blog. It gets a little traffic, and the occasional comment posted back. I try to write things that people want to read, and I generally know how to use the English language. I only put up a post every few months on average, because, frankly, I've got other things going. Mostly, though, I post things there because I want to write. One day I'll look back and say, "Hey, look what I was thinking that day," but I don't expect it to make me a living. That's just silly.
So, like a significant portion of bloggers out there, my blog probably appeals to a very, very small fraction of the population of Internet surfers as a whole. But I'm doing something I like to do and I'm serving some sort of mostly anonymous audience. I'll be happy with that for the forseeable future, and I'm probably not going anywhere. I am not, however, doing anything that will supplant "traditional media." I really think that the future will be one where blogs become considered one component of traditional media, some with quality, others lacking. It's the same way in broadcast news and periodical print media.
Oh, enough already. I'm starting to blather.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Other blogs can compliment traditional media in other ways - for example, Juan Cole [juancole.com] is a professor of history with a focus on the middle east, and often adds a lot of context and detail from foreign sources into events going on and what they mean within a historical context. The implications of, for example, the election in Lebanon are a lot meaningful when the history of the leaders and tribes involved in voting, and detailed descriptions of the voting system and how it has been used/manipulated in history are available.
Not all blogs are just "Looks like Bush really was AWOL!" or "It seems that Kerry's grades were worse than Bush's!" editorial-logs.
Why Blogs Have Become So Popular (Score:2, Insightful)
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born? [blogspot.com]". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Blogs Are Here To Stay And The Impact Will Deepen (Score:2, Insightful)
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born? [blogspot.com]". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO this very wrong. Ever try to find something essoteric? Something not quite easy to find on a site for a variety of reasons? As I've been blogging for about a year on design, I get quite a number of hits from people looking for a link. Not everything is easily Google-able. Bloggers are, again in my opinion, adding to the the information base of the web by categorizing things. Not everybody creates content, but Yahoo didn't begin by creating information, but linking to it.
I think the actual problem is too much opinion. Who really cares about what everybody thinks. I want respected opinions. The web opens up the possibility of this by creating a publishing platform, but it doesn't make the material valuable. The value is in those links...
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, on 9/11, for the first time in years, I was watching TV for hours. But afterwards, I hit the internet, because TV and newspapers were ignoring the wider implications of 9/11 that mattered the most to me.
For example, on 9/11 every politician, Republican and Democrat, seemed to be reading from the same script. "Act of war", "A new Pearl Harbor". This seriously freaked me out. The decision had already been made to go to war before we had any facts. And it was obvious that there would soon be an inevitable crack down on civil liberties (i.e. Patriot Act)
I've stopped directly consuming the mainstream media, because it is so ethically compromised that it is no longer relevant to me. The current indifference of the US media over the Downing Street Memo is case in point.
Sure they can... (Score:2, Insightful)
(In other words: Read it, compare it, judge it, learn from the differences.)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
And that ensures that one is getting accurate information from the traditional news media because...? I guess I should believe that a random military officer went to the trouble, in the early 1970s, to typeset his private memos about GWB; after all, the folks at CBS have college deg--oops, college degrees!
Of course, traditional media's had its own share of problems the past couple years, but then that's partly because they're actually held to some sort of ethical standard.
And who's been holding them to that standard? Blogs, in large part. Media are supposed to be a countervailing force...but they've become sufficiently large and powerful that they themselves need a countervailing force, and blogs are providing one.
Blogs are not held to any standards whatsoever, and any blogger can get away with pretty much anything they want, however erroneous or borderline slanderous their statements may be.
Blogs are held to the same standards as other sources of information--if people discover that they are erroneous, they won't pay attention any more and go somewhere else for information.
Re:Blog = Personal webpage (Score:4, Insightful)
The opposite is also true -- when actual journalism appears on blogs, some people mistake it for "inane self-indulgent ramblings".
A blog is format, not content.
Re:Rise and FALL?-I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:3, Insightful)
I also find that people who spend all their time cruising the web for their information end up rather, shall we say, eccentric. I have a friend who considers himself a liberal, but has actually managed to become a Nazi--he doesn't wear the uniform, but get a few drinks into him and he will start spouting vintage Goebbels propaganda. The reason is that the Nazis distributed their propaganda amongst the arabs back during the war (the Baath party is actually the Iraqi version of the Nazi party.) This stuff is now resurfacing; it forms the basis for a lot of the Islamic anti-semitism, and is also making its way back into vogue amongst some parts of the radical left through the anti-war movement. So you end up with "leftists" embracing the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. As Northrop Frye put it, an open mind should be open at both ends, and should excrete as well as consume.
If the mainstream media does not carry stories, it probably isn't because the story is supressed or too dangerous. It's probably because they looked into it, and found out it was bull. I've discovered that if you fact check the fact checkers in blogs, you will usually find that their "facts" evaporate into a puff of inuendo when examined carefully. I can't tell you how many times I've followed links on popular blogs like instapundit and found myself standing up to my neck in garbage. Everything in blogs should be taken with a LOT of salt.
Blogs were always tripe, and will always be (Score:3, Insightful)
The bad blogs, were, well bad. The good blogs were, well, good, but bad. How so?
Well, blogging became a trite and annoying word, and those who could have had sane web content published to their site using automated means, whose instead to label this technology as an action.
The fact that the verb was the technology is an irkish trait.
The verb should have been removed from the underlying technology, the whole process of writing has been around, suddenly a technology comes around that does... nothing... one day all these forum / im / chat processes were relabeled with a piece of jargon, and everyone wanted to do it.
If you trace the ancient entymology of 'blog you will find an antique phrase:
web log
web is a protraction of world-wide-web, a name given to the http related protocols that run on the 'net (route: english, from word 'Internet' from older phrase 'interconnected network'). log is the same as the ancient word 'log' meaning a piece of felled tree.
The act of web logging means you kept a series of diary like thoughts. However, most were not diaries, but link dumps, or a way of changing the front page content of a website. Which makes sense.
But, althought you write a diary on a diary, and a newspaper on a newspaper, and a tv guide on a tv guide, and a sightseeing book, in, a , erm, sightseeing book, they are not all the same thing.
You can call it publishing, but blogging has other roots, and the misuse of the term is like garlic salt on an open eye wound.
My favourite blog was my friends, it was unpretentious, only about 5 people ever read it. I preffer that.
Basically, write an article if you have something to say, if you want to write a how-to, write a how -to.
Don't blog a how-to, or blog a hack.
And weblogs.com can die, as can any other 'auto-content-blog-content-write-for-us-
content
google-friendl
Making it too easy to publish things that went into the global conscience of the web, just made it easier for the people who saw little value in what they wrote to just write more of it, and make it EASIER (or more difficult for google) for them to infect the mainstream.
Blogging was one hell of a signal/noise screw over, and for that, they can tongue my sweaty starfish, the bastards.
Re:Blog (un)Accountability (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
This is why one of the great things about blogs is that you don't have to read them.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically here, but I really don't get why people complain about blogs. Sure, the majority of them are self-indulgent, pointless and relevant to no more than six people worldwide. So what?
I could see the complainers' point if it was on some common resource--a public web forum, USENET newsgroup or public mailing list--but it's not. Each blogger uses a single, specific website that they're paying for (one way or another). It's really, really easy to just pretend it doesn't exist.
The thing about blogs is that the vast majority exist for the the sole benefit of the blogger. They're not writing for you--they're writing for themselves, and that's not a bad thing. It means people are learning to express themselves and that they're creating content rather than just passively absorbing it. It's a healthy trend (IMHO).
(By the way, I don't blog. I made a vow long ago not to blog until I'd written my own software and I haven't gotten around to that yet.)