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."

Depends on how you define "Geek"

[Vonotar82]

Oh, I don't know about decline...let's look at it like this: Gaming was once considered "geeky", now it's almost the best way for random strangers to meet and unite behind a common goal, i.e. to win. 1up.com has an extensive blogging network, and I daresay most of it is, or WAS geeky in nature. It all depends on how you use the word. Not all geeks are the Dilbert type. Some are more extroverted, and though their interests are deep in the geek world, they can express themselves with the clarity and excitement of a Dan Brown or Clive Cussler. So I would imagine this "decline" is true...but only for a given value of true.

Re:Meh.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think it's easy to downplay "blogs"* but didn't they have a strong influence in how some elections played out? They seem to have been instrumental in getting out some embarassing facts that certain politicians didn't want known and wasn't covered by the regular media. Wasn't the video of evidence of Pat Robertson's lie first posted on a web log?

* I really don't like the name, hence the quotes.

Nothing new, it's the way media works

[ShatteredDream]

It's actually quite interesting to watch the dynamic between many of the right wing media rising stars like Michelle Malkin and Ben Shapiro and the bloggers on the right. Shapiro for example has been writing whiny pieces about being called a chickenhawk because he is a 21 year old rich kid who advocates empire and yet would rather go to harvard law than into the army. Malkin got severely challenged by Vox Day to a debate over the accuracy of her military facts in her book on internment which she wrote a bunch of blog posts and articles for many news publications about. The one thing you see a lot of is that the people who get big in any type of media, and blogging is a type of media, are people who regurgitate news such as the "metabloggers" (Instapundit for example) and bloggers who pretty much whore themselves out to one of the popular groups like the Republicans.

The bigger the personality, the less they like actually engaging the public. That's why I don't read Powerline, even though I am firmly on the right. IMO any blog that doesn't allow for comments or trackbacks, and isn't as big as Instapundit and a metablog (which would make comments/trackbacks VERY expensive to despam) is a blog I won't read. No matter how good it may seem, I won't read the blog unless it's really something you'd never get from the MSM like Michael Yon's coverage of the War in Iraq.

Seriously people, go into a big book store like a B&N or a BAM and look at the political magazines. The biggest ones are the ones that more often reiterate talking points than ones that are cool and challenge people to think. Reason for example, arguably one of the best political publications in the USA, has a readership I think that doesn't even reach 60,000 nation-wide. Yet the National Review, a rag by comparison, probably has at least ten times that because of the support of the Republican faithful.

Here's a cold, hard truth. Most people don't like their ideas being challenged. Clinton supporters always wanted to believe it was about sex and not purjury. Bush supporters can't fathom the possibility that Bush lied about Iraq and has absolutely no interest in defending our sovereignty. Most people like their nice little pre-conceived notions and have very limited real interests. It gets even worse when you get into technical areas like geek blogging because the market is inherently smaller.

If you're going to do your own thing, be prepared to not have much support from the general public. That's all there is to it. It may not be that geek blogging is going into decline, it's probably just that geek blogging is being severely eclipsed by other parts of the blogging world which IS GREAT for online civil liberties. We want blogging to be part of most Americans lives because it gets them active online with free speech. The more people get used to using their rights, the more people will actually notice a loss when they're stripped of them. You can't miss something you never had or used.

It's not in decline - just changing as always

[kallisti777]

So the gist of the article is that geeks adopt technology early, then abandon that technology once the masses start to use it and lower the signal to noise ratio. Reasonable enough. What I'd like to know is why isn't this article called "The Rise of Geek Podcasting"?

Check out the iTunes Top 100: Leo Laporte and his TechTV pals have two or three shows each, PBS science programming is in the top ten, and a couple of sysadmins with no budget [wehatetech.com] were ranked higher than Fox News yesterday. Every idiot and their dog might have a live journal, but can they produce Internet radio?

This is Usenet all over again. Move along, nothing to see... we geeks know where to find each other.

so what's the "next New Cool thing[tm]"?

[m4c north]

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.

Exactly. So, what have they built, and what are they building now? I think the next chic-geek bandwagon could be contributing to wikis or being part of an OSS development team...

"Geek Bloggers" versus "Consumer Bloggers"

[mdwh2]

The author seems to be confusing two different styles of blog.

The first is someone who writes (often on a standalone website) with the intention of being read by and being interesting to complete strangers. This corresponds to the first two generations.

The second, what he calls "consumer bloggers". These may use a blog for various reasons, such as personal journalling, or communicating with friends, but it's rarely intended that what they write is targetted to people who don't know them. Similarly, such people are unlikely to read blogs other than those of their friends.

Whilst there are crossovers, these are very distinct usages (so much so, that I always feel it's misleading to group them under the term "blogger" - "blog" is just a medium, and says nothing about the usage or intention of the writing).

If the first has given way to the second, I guess it's because few people want to read things written by strangers, even if they are quite interesting, and the second usage of blogs is far more powerful. But I see no evidence that the first style of blogging is in decline, and even if it is, this may not be related to "consumer blogging" at all.

I also feel the author has the timelines wrong for "consumer blogging" - LiveJournal for example has been around since 1999 [livejournal.com], which always made it easy to set up a blog (the author claims it was "a damn site harder to set up a blog than it is now" even in 2002!) and since about 2002, the vast majority of people I know have had blogs, and used them as "consumer blogs".

The term "geek blogger" is a bit misleading too - most of the people I know with blogs could be considered "geeks", but they're using them in the style of consumer blogging, rather than the first style of blogging.

Re:Please make it stop

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to write != the ability to reason.

And thus why schools should resume teaching rhetoric and logic at a secondary, or even elementary level.

Re:No kidding!

[drsquare]

Not really.

A 'blog' is someone's personal journal, which is on the Internet. These comments aren't a diary. Slashdot is just a normal forum, with the discussions attached to news stories.

The only 'blog-like' thing on this site is the journal facility, which hardly anyone uses.

Numbers Game

[n3bulous]

If you compare the two technorati links, the first thing you see is that the numbers of blog links is higher. In 2-3 years, that's to be expected.

The author also states we are in a more consumer blog error. Well duh, compare this to websites back in 1993/94 and again in 1996/97 after the consumer market got wind of it. In 1993, all of the websites were geek-ish, the early adopters. By 1997, businesses were everywhere and producing brochure sites for non-geeks.

Hence, the percentage of geek stuff is down. We're a small percentage of the population so in the end we'll be a small percentage of the blog world. What surprises me is that geek blogs are not further down the list. Face it, you'll have to come up with something new to regain your l33t ego boost.

What really scares me is:

a) This guy wrote that many words and missed the point.
b) People actually read it before /. got wind of it and commented on the author's good reasoning.

PS. I just read the article's comments and Seth Finkelstein also noticed the author miss-analyzed the technorati rankings.