Geek Blogging is in Decline

p0 writes " Geek blogging is in decline. Can the geek bloggers be saved? Saving is probably not the right word, because there is always going to be a market place for the Dave Winers of this world; it's just that their audience will continue to shrink in relation to market share in comparison to other existing, and yet to be written blogs. [New consumer] bloggers aren't going to be interested in Winer driving a car and finding free internet access, nor Scoble playing with alpha technologies with other geeks whilst seemingly camped out in someone's office."

Re:Meh.

[Seumas]

I've never heard of the blogs that were linked to in the blurb. I don't read blogs, unless you count Slashdot - which I dont' really since Slashdot is just a regular website (when was the last time Taco talked about his trip somewhere or hemos gave the breakdown on his relationship or.. anything from any of them in fact).

I didn't even know blogs have been around that many years. I didn't even really know about them as "blogs" until a year or two ago. And there aren't really blogs that I care to read. I look at engadget, but I dont' see how that's a blog either. It's more of a bunch of links than a blog. Or are we now calling collections of links "blogs" as well? And blogs that are links to blogs about blogs about blogs are blogs, too?

I couldn't care less what happens to blogs. Let all the 12 year olds and single moms flood the net with them. Nobody's forcing me to read that crap.

Blogs are just instant-sites for those with what they think is something important to say that don't have the intelligence or interest in setting up their own actual website.

In other words, I guess this sort of effects me the same way telling me Dawson's Creek is about to be canceled would. I simply wouldn't care because it has nothing to do with my life or my interests.

It's official

[Mock]

It's official!

Careful, well thought out blog pieces are on the decline, and are in danger of becoming extinct as muddled or non-thinkers take over the web!

If you don't believe me, just look at the evidentory piece cited above.

Its not in Decline

[dcstimm]

Is it based on Percentage? Just because there is a million idiots out there flooding the internet with their blogs its lowering the percentage of geeks that do it.

No big deal

They are the ones

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was the geeks who were the ones who blogged.

In unrelated News

[MatthewNewberg]

In Unrelated News: Dork and Nerd Blogs are on the rise.

Geek Graphic Designers in Decline, Too

[RobotRunAmok]

Have been since about 1995.

In the five or so years prior to that, as the geeks were the first to establish presences on the Web (both as individuals and for their companies), we wrote the HTML, load-balanced the servers, and photo-shopped and [saints preserve us...] ShockWaved our heinies off, cuz the medium was so new, no one knew it looked like crap. It was just new tech, and we were the tech guys, so, we did it. All of it, including the design and content stuff that we had no business having anything to do with. Circa mid-90's, proper business practices began to develop, and the professional content and design people "moved on to the Web," and we geeks, for the most part, found ourselves back in the server rooms and behind our compilers where we belonged.

What are "blogs" but 21st century "personal web pages?" The content management software is slicker than the vi and notepad.exe we used 15 years ago, but the intents are the same. And we Geeks were once again at the forefront (and it showed, in most of the pedantic content). Now, big media and other corporations have caught the new-old wave, and the content people too busy with their professional deadlines up to now are finally being pointed towards the direction of the -- dare I say it? -- 'blogosphere.' Geeks, once the blogging majority, find their mindshare getting edged out by pro writers, photographers, designers, and people who just have more interesting lives about which to blog.

It's not a bad thing.

In the meantime, the geeks are moving into podcasting, and so the Circle of Life continues... (cue the zebras...)

I think the answer is easy

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Geeks like to do things differently. They're also early adopters. When blogs become the universal tool for 13 year olds to post about their feelings about becoming a woman, random guys posting about their new cars, all manners of Roland Piquepailles making a fat buck out of it, and any old idiot raving and ranting about things nobody gives a shit about, geeks get tired of it, disillusioned and move on to the next New Cool thing[tm] that's probably there already, just still under the radar.

I'm amazed...

[merkac]

that we have something as cool as a worldwide computer network, and yet we've labelled practically everything on it as a "blog".

You write your thoughts down on a web page? that's a blog
You keep a travel diary on the web? That's a blog.
You keep an updated todo list on the web? That's a blog.
You keep track of your projects on a web page? That's a blog.
You keep an updated list of links to tech/news/gossip/anything? That's a blog.

Blogging is like the word "smurf".

Of *course* blogging is important if you label every fucking thing on the web "a blog".

Why can't we get over all these stupid meta-blogging articles, and realise that it's just fucking "content creation by individuals" and it doesn't need a fucking name.

Re:I think the answer is easy

[Bogtha]

geeks get tired of it, disillusioned and move on to the next New Cool thing[tm] that's probably there already, just still under the radar.

I think you have the causality the wrong way around. It's geeks that build things like blogging tools and it's geeks that get the rest of the world doing it too. It's not that geeks get bored and move on to the "next big thing" - it's just that "the next big thing" is usually built by geeks, so they are inevitably the initial core user group. The real difference between mainstream and cutting edge is simply that the geeks doing mainstream stuff aren't as obvious as the geeks doing cutting edge stuff because everybody is doing mainstream stuff.

Think about it - email, the WWW, etc - once they were the sole province of geeks. The geeks built the next big things as well, but they didn't do it because they were bored and moved on, did they?

Evolutionary Blogosphere

[Sundroid]

I used to have Scolbe's and Doc Searls's blogs in my Bookmarks, but I haven't had them for months, because after a while, I just got tired of hearing the same tunes and the same philosophies. New bloggers are coming out every day with refreshing and unique angles of their own, and if they're good, the fans of Scolbe and Doc Searls will discover them and switch their loyalty in a Bookmark second.

This is nothing new. It happens to every medium. Like TV, for instance, at one point, people just got tired of "Seinfeld", or "Friends", so the shows got canceled, then the new Thursday-night lineups were announced, and life continued. It's called "evolution", and it's healthy.

Also, I think the term "geek blogger" is a bit oxymoronic, because a blogger IS a geek. The notion that somebody out there with the looks of Angelina Jolie is blogging away merrily is... Well, keep fantasizing. I maintain a blog (at: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]) for personal enjoyment, and I assume the thousands of people who sign up for new accounts every day are doing it with similar intent -- nothing unhealthy there.

Please make it stop

[TrappedByMyself]

Geek blogging is in decline. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Feedster 500 or Technorati 100 today and compare it to the Technorati Top 100 over the last few years. Take a look back in time to the top 10 in the Techorati Top 100 on November 26, 2002 and you'll see the generation of founding geek bloggers dominating the list: Doc Searls, Dave Winer...fast forward a year and things have started to change.

So, for geek tools, geeks usually get there first. Since, umm, they are the ones to create the tools. So since 100% of the users are geeks, then the top 10 lists will be dominated by geeks. So when it spreads into the non geek world, where there are more non geeks than geeks, hence 'non geek world', some percentage of the users will be non geeks. Non geeks will be more interested in what non geeks have to say, so top 10 lists will no longer be doninated by geeks.

In other words, when there are a bunch of apples, all of them are apples. When you throw in some oranges, they aren't all apples anymore. They are apples and oranges. I know its hard to follow, but trust me, its true.

The ability to write != the ability to reason.

I don't agree

[gaanagaa]

I don't think this is a decline. As the popularity and need for the Internet is growing so fast, more and more people(consumers) have access to this internet. 10-15 years back mostly geeks or IT pros had access to the internet. At that time even this site ("Slashdot.org - News for Nerds) was not so popular as we see today.

Hooray.

[sakusha]

Idiots like Winer and Searls and the "inner circle" of blogging always act like people MUST listen to them. Perhaps the audience has finally learned they have nothing to say.

It can only be a good thing when self-appointed Blog Emperors(tm) are discovered to be wearing no clothes.

Re:Nothing new, it's the way media works

[YrWrstNtmr]

And that's one of the problems(?!) with all this new technology. A zillion cable channels, blogs, and other info regurgitators...people can and do seek out viewpoints, opinions, and TV shows that match their opinion. And only theirs. Validation of their own thoughts, instead of critical analyzation of something else.

Previously (in the US), we had the local newspaper, and the 3 networks. The individual was left to himself to figure things out. Now...we have an entire series of talking heads, spewing your viewpoint exactly, no matter where on the spectrum you lie. And because its "in the media", it must be true and valid.

Re:No kidding!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Discussing (in a blog) about an article in a blog about "blogging is dead" is dead!

I've never understood the claim that Slashdot is a blog. Being short for "web log", I know Slashdot is a web site, but where is the log part? I've always understood log as in diary or records of events done on a specific object. It really doesn't make sense to say that it's a log of all of nerd-dom (or nerd-dumb) because that's pretty vague rather than specific.

.plan

[elliotj]

Parent makes a good point. There's nothing to see here. Move along.

Sure we could all talk about the evolution of blogging, but framing the discussion in terms of a "decline" of geek blogging, and that blogging by technical people is something that must be "saved' is simply a ridiculous form of spin.

Oh, I remember the good old days when a blog was a .plan file. I remember typing "finger [e-mail]" to find out the latest dirt on Quake. It wasn't called blogging at the time. It was just the Internet. The Internet back then was pretty new to most people.

Nowadays, blogging is more an online way of sharing stuff with your friends. The average blog is probably only read by a dozen people who know the blogger. It's a way of posting your digital photos and yakking about your life. A substitute for an email mailing list. Big deal.

Much has been made of blogging. The Howard Dean phenomenon. The blogosphere. It's all pretty retarded. Lo and behold, people are posting their thoughts and opinions on web pages. How novel.

Re:Meh.

[Nomad37]

Let me summarise your point of view (from my point of view):

1. I don't like blogs
2. Any blogs I do like, I will classify as not being a blog
3. Thus, through a feat of amazingly selective definition, I can confidently anounce that I don't care about any of the sites I don't enjoy reading.

Thank you, thank you, more lessons in deceptive arguments in the future (by which I mean any part of the future I feature in, cuz the other stuff that is going to happen after the present, I don't really count as the future, since I don't care about it).

Geeks will be overcome by porn :(

[unclocked]

Geeks, unfortunately, will be overcome by average folks who will be overcome by spammers who will be overcome by porn. It's what we can evolution. Don't we?

Re:No kidding!

[That's Unpossible!]

I've never understood the claim that Slashdot is a blog. Being short for "web log"

It is quite simply because weblogs, at their core, are just "articles" posted about one subject, with links to other areas of the web with more details on that particular subject, and a place for other people to comment on the article.

Sound familiar now?

Nothing new under the sun

[Dobeln]

This has been a recurring phenomenon from the dawn of geekdom. As (if) a technology gains mainstream acceptance, the ur-core of geeks in the field get crowded out, and sometimes marginalized.

An example: At the dawn of computer gaming, the ultra-geeky wargaming hobby was "big thing" to do on computers. As the Madden-ization of the gaming progressed, wargaming was pushed to the fringes, catered to by mailorder-only outfits such as Matrixgames (www.matrixgames.com) or Battlefront (www.battlefront.com).

Re:Meh.

[azaris]

When it comes down to it, nobody really want's to hear what you had for dinner, how your date went, or if your hemorrhoids are clearing up. If there's a shared interest it might invoke some discussions, and that's the only valuable attribute of a "blog". People have always fawned over celebrities, so when Brad Pitt starts a public "blog" fanatics don't get excited because he's "blogging", it would be the same as if he was yelling out his window. I'm not sure what's more depressing, when some average Sally "blogs" about what she's going to wear today, or when somebody actually *reads* that crap regularily.

The irony of venting on a blog about how much blogs suck and expecting other people to read with interest is apparently lost on many of these blog-haters.

Not all blogs are about the boring lives of mundane people, and even if they were that would still be more interesting than reading this perpetual moaning about blogs.

Re:Meh.

[bhtooefr]

Let all the 12 year olds and single moms flood the net with them.

Interestingly, what you're talking about is most likely not a blog.

Journal = Daily record of events (taken from define:journal)
Diary = Daily record of personal events (as in, not affecting much else) - read: what most people use blogging/journal software for, and what you're talking about
Weblog = Daily record of websites visited

A pure blog will contain links to interesting sites (interesting meaning interesting to the author).

A pure diary will talk about personal events (e.g., OMG I jsut got dumped!)

There's other kinds of journals, of course, but those are the big two.

Mine is mostly a blog, with a slight hint of diary in there (used to complement the links). Basically, anecdotes tied to sites.

(OK, so there are the entries about Cedar Point and this laptop...)

Also, I've had my own site, but I've seen no need for it, as the journal format simply works better. If I actually get the chance to work on some projects, a different format will definitely work better, and I'll set up a traditional site.