Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite! 110
Carl Bialik writes "'Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging,' Jason Fry writes on WSJ.com, responding to a recent wave of blog-doubting that includes a Gallup poll and a Chicago Tribune editorial entitled, 'Bloggy, we hardly knew ye.' Fry says blogging might not fly as a business, but 'the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money won't mean the end of blogs -- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits.'"
Re:First hand experience (Score:2, Interesting)
Blogs are great for organizational news; we use them at work a lot for staff communication. We have a lot of people that work a wide range of hours, so our blog has replaced having to email everybody in the office to share news. Keeps our inboxes clean(er) and makes it easier to archive and search old messages.
The problem with blogs is that there are 10 million morons who think that they have something intelligent to share and that their ramblings is a good replacement for actual local, national, and world news. Because of this the percentage of blogs that are crap is fairly high, but blogs are still a very useful tool.
As for blogging fading away, it's expected that the number of blogs/bloggers will plummet. It became the trendy thing to do, so a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and made blogs just to join in. Once the fad start to fade, most of these people will lose interest and find another trend to follow. However the people who actually have an interest/need for blogs will remain. So, it's not that blogging is dieing, it's that the size of the blogging community was unnaturally high and is now simply fixing itself.
Re:Only The Hype Will Die (Score:3, Interesting)
So I sat there and they were talking about that hip new thing called blogs. That was the first time I heard about that phenomenon. The whole time I was trying hard to gasp the concept behind all this but whenever I thought, ok where's the meat, it turned out that in the end they were simply talking about people writing about stuff on their own homepages. I was like, WTF? This is the whole POINT of the web! I mean, c'mon, isn't it? Wasn't this hyped 1993 or sth.? What were YOU thinking the information super highway is all about? Were you just unfrozen from carbonite or what?
When I was finally asked on the topic I said something how I am turning to "blogs" (I used it like I had known all the time what it was) everday whenever I surf the web. They were thrilled. It was like it was 1995 all over again and someone told them that it was POSSIBLE to distribute stuff from your desk to the whole world. I was just wondering, WHAT in the world had they'd been thinking the last 7 years was all about?
Am I still missing the point or is this just as fundamental trivial as it seems?