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Geek Blogging is in Decline 176

Posted by Zonk from the blog-isn't-a-dirty-word-anymore dept.
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."
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Geek Blogging is in Decline More

Geek Blogging is in Decline

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  • Found in a blog, even. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kid Zero ( 4866 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:19PM (#13418454) Homepage Journal
    I guess that makes it news if you find it in a blog.

  • Judging by the amount of responses to this article (Score:5, Funny)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:20PM (#13418462) Homepage Journal
    2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.

    Yah geek blogging is dead.
    • 2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.

      Yah geek blogging is dead

      I don't know, isn't there a sci-fi show on cable somewhere right now? That can explain geeks not responding in a timely manner.
    • Netcraft confirms it. [netcraft.com]

      Mods: -1: old and painfully overused joke

  • No wonder geekblogging is in decline (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tim_F ( 12524 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:21PM (#13418464)
    Topics like those listed in the article summary are maybe only vaguely interesting once. I know I get bored discussing that stuff over and over again. The geeks that do discuss things like that repeatedly are the ones that bore my socks off. Imagine what the general public must think when they come across something like that.

  • Meh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Shky ( 703024 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (yraeloykhs)> on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:22PM (#13418467) Homepage Journal
    In related news, early adopters are eventually joined by late adopters in an event that has been dubbed as "popularity."

    • Re:Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
      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

      • Re:Meh. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:48PM (#13418599) Homepage Journal
        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.
        • no.

          bloggers were falling all over themselves for howard dean, remember? he didn't come close to being nominated, let alone elected. and the "blogosphere" wept.

          blogs serve as an "echo chamber" for like-minded people. they link to each other, post in agreement with each other, and then count the posts and post about how much they agree with each other some more.

          pat robertson has never even been as close to nomination or public office as howard dean was to the presidency. uncovering a lie he told is not

      • Re:Meh. (Score:4, Funny)

        by Otter ( 3800 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:48PM (#13418602) Journal
        Historical point -- when the word "weblog" was coined, Slashdot was *the* prototypical example. C'mon, judging from your UID, you've been here long enough to know that.

        And FYI, Dawson's Creek ended maybe three years ago....

      • It's too bad I don't have mod points right now because you'd get them.

        I've always looked at "blogs" as an annoying fad which has recently gotten the attention of almost every corner of the media. No real "blog" has the attentive audience that traditional media does, nor does it have anywhere near the impact. If some shmuck's "blog" did reach the same influence as something akin to CNN it stopped being a "blog" a long time ago and has transformed into a form of independent author's rhetorical column.

        When i

        • Re:Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by azaris ( 699901 )

          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

          • 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.

            See, I don't view /. as a blog at all. It is a niche news media site, owned by a corporation, with a commenting system to allow readers to discuss whatever has been posted. It's not a [web] log of anything.

            Kind of like CSPAN when they let people call in after a televised debate, but for nerds instead of old ladies.

          • 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.

            I feel sorry for people that don't have a Mommy.

      • Re:Meh. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Nomad37 ( 582970 )
        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,

      • Re:Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
        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

    • Re:Meh. (Score:1)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Once upon a time when you picked up a phone you were pretty sure to get Watson on the other end.

      Ahhh, the good old days.

      Now the phone lines seem to be jammed with muggles talking about sex, the weather and shopping lists.

      What happened?

      KFG
      • You still use 'phones with lines?
        Tsk. That's Sooooo 1980's...

    • .plan (Score:4, Insightful)

      by elliotj ( 519297 ) <slashdot AT elliotjohnson DOT com> on Saturday August 27, 2005 @11:20PM (#13419284) Homepage
      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 johnc@idsoftware.com" 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.

  • It's official (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mock ( 29603 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:28PM (#13418504)
    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.
    • 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 bun
      • 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 vie

      • Clinton supporters always wanted to believe it was about sex and not purjury.

        I don't recall the rule of law being brought up very often during that morass. What I recall was a barrage of moral positions. Clinton was a shameful idiot when it came to his personal life, but the right would have been much better off leveraging his acitivies to undermine his credibility. "Would you trust a man who's getting blowjobs from interns in the Oval Office" would have been a lot stronger than "He lied to us about getting

  • Its not in Decline (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dcstimm ( 556797 )
    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

  • Good news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mensa Babe ( 675349 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:29PM (#13418507) Homepage Journal
    Hopefully the ordinary blogging will follow.

  • They are the ones (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought it was the geeks who were the ones who blogged.

  • And why are you surprised? (Score:3, Informative)

    by TheWart ( 700842 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:30PM (#13418512)
    I think most people recognized the blogging craze as just that: a fad that will ebb along with every other fad...

    Sure, there are those blogs that will always have readers, posters, etc...but (hopefully) the days of "OMG...I HAVE A BLOG!!! READ IT!!" are over.
    • I think most people recognized the blogging craze as just that: a fad that will ebb along with every other fad...

      I think you misinterpreted the article (just as I think the article misrepresents the topic). I don't think the case is really that geek blogs are on the decline, and there are as many that remain very important in the geek community. However, as blogging has gone mainstream, the geek blogger has been dwarfed by the mainstream blogger, thus losing relational rankings in things like the top 100. T
  • This is reminding me of the whole internet boom, except with way less invested.

  • In unrelated News (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MatthewNewberg ( 519685 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:32PM (#13418528) Homepage
    In Unrelated News: Dork and Nerd Blogs are on the rise.

  • Geek Graphic Designers in Decline, Too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) * on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:37PM (#13418543)
    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...)
    • Well, you didn't have to go so far as to use stupid media catch-phrases like ****osphere or ***casting (*'d out to pass the yuppie filter), the latter of which is hardly new or a geek endeavor, what with the fact that it's really just streaming audio by another name and even talk show hosts who can't figure out to use their phone systems are doing it, but your post is pretty much right on. I don't think, though, that is any particular direction the "geeks are moving" right now, they're just being displaced

  • I think the answer is easy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:37PM (#13418545)
    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.

    • Re:I think the answer is easy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:58PM (#13418651)

      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?

      • "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?"

        Um ... actually ... Yes, they did. All of it, every bit of technology that has come down the pike, is because of a bored geek that was staring at his terminal thinking to him/herself "Isn't there a better way to do this?"

        Email? Geek waiting for a Professor to login to the mainframe to drop him a "walled"

        • You've missed my point. Just because geeks go on to built other cool stuff, it doesn't mean that they get bored with and stop using the stuff built earlier. The examples I gave - email and the WWW - are still widely used by geeks, despite many "next big things" having been built since then. Consider the context:

          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

        • WWW? "I need to share this static information with several people in Berlin, one in England, a Professor in Boston and a married couple in Sydney.

          As I understand it, the web was created to facillitate the sharing of academic information (papers, etc) between researchers. In that sense, you're half right, but the "married couple in Sydney" wouldn't have been on the inventers' minds.
      • 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...

  • My guess, is that geeks don't find blogs that fun, or cool. While everyone else who doesn't know much about computers thinks this is the coolest think since sliced bread and its simple to do. Just log into a blog site and start blogging about their life or whatever they want to talk about and most of it is pointless rants about nothing. Just fludding the internet with more crap that google searches have to sort through for us to get our answers about the geek things we are looking for.

  • Bloggers perhaps (Score:4, Funny)

    by fussili ( 720463 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:42PM (#13418569)

    But there seems to be a glut of excellent Geek Podcasts - I guess that eventually there were so many of us that a few had to end up with some form of charisma.

    Monkeys, Typewriters, you know the drill. Imagine if you will that when we reach some 'critical mass' of geeks, one of us will statistically be socially adept and even capable of balancing an active social life with rampant Geeking-out. It's like the Matrix only with less IP theft.

  • /. is safe as houses though!

    I have my own geek blog, and it's not just any other blog, it has it's own special features in the way it works etc, yeah, I'll open it up soon, but until it's sorted it will remain closed.

    That's not terribly useful right now, but I see the geek blog as a can of food for google. The more detail I put into the blog, the more chance users will hit my site, and thus use the paypal button.

    I do watch the webalizer statistics, and certain searches do repeat, so the demand for the data
  • Since when is technology the sole defining characteristic of geeks? I'm a geek. I blog [blogspot.com] about books that I'm reading. I seem to recall reading being a geeky activity, ergo it's a geek blog.

    You don't need teh mad skillz to get Linux running on a spoon in order to be a geek.

    Pomme de Terre!
  • 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 exci

  • Zonk and blogging stories (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Hobo ( 783784 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:49PM (#13418606)
    YAZBS (Yet Another Zonk Blogging Story)

    Look for the magic word in the title/summary/links:
    One [slashdot.org] Two [slashdot.org] Three [slashdot.org] Four [slashdot.org] Five [slashdot.org] Six [slashdot.org] Seven [slashdot.org] Eight [slashdot.org] Nine [slashdot.org] Ten [slashdot.org] Eleven [slashdot.org] Twelve [slashdot.org] Thirteen [slashdot.org] Fourteen [slashdot.org]

    There's probably more, but there's definitely a trend: If you want a story posted on Slashdot, find (or in some cases, make up) blog-related "news" while Zonk is on duty
  • Every slashdotter already knows this. I mean, this place has been in decline for years.

    Nothing to see here...

  • I'm amazed... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by merkac ( 553485 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:55PM (#13418638) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Blog is Web Log... a log is a recording of daily or at least linear events... a site which is dedicated to such activities and presented in such a linear/date ordered manner... as opposed to a corporate site or a review site or whatever that is topically sorted and non-linear.

      I'm sure people thought of other contractions but Blog was the one that stuck

    • The key word there is "updated". Something that is updated every week, and where this week's article only makes sense this week (as opposed to a website where someone adds to it, but the added page "should" have been there all along), is not a typical web page. The web was seen as something where you wrote the pages and put them there, and the only reason to add to it was if there were new facts or things you hadn't put in the first time. Like a book, not a magazine. Blog sites are different from that.
  • market place for the Dave Winer's of this world, its just that their audience

    If less geek blogging means fewer misused [wsu.edu] apostrophes [wsu.edu], I'm all for it.
    • Considering that less geek blogging probably doesn't diminish to the steady rise in teen blogging, I think there'll be even more of it, in terms of sheer number.
    • I'd say that less geek blogging would mean more OMFG!?, worse grammar and more soap opera garbage.
  • This comes at a time when I just removed my blog. I was planning to put it back up again but its still interesting that this study came out.

    I tend to agree with the idea that its not really geeks are blogging less but there are more nongeeks blogging. That is a logical thing that is happening.

    For instance 10 years ago only geeks knew what mp3s were and used them but now everyone knows the term and everyone can easily download them. This is just another example of an internet service/idea that has gone mains

  • Ok, so more people is discovering blogs nowadays. Since geeks are a minority, there is not shocking news that geek blogs are becomming less common.

  • This is very similar to what happens to popular tech/geek sites and their audience over time. At the beginning we have early adopters, and those tend to be technically savvy people and geeks. Web server log analysis shows high percentage of Firefox and Safari browsers. Time passes, and the site becomes known to less techy people. Web server log analysis starts showing a decline in Firefox users and increase in Internet Explorer users, despite Firefox slowly taking over and spreading among the typical In
  • I have thought about tossing up a web site I have had many good ideas for content that still is hard to find in a clear consice way on the net, but I fear that any website made after 2004 that belongs to an individual will automaticly be labled a "blog"

    It is just like podcasting, anyone who has ever put an audio file on a web site before last fall was a looser/nerd/geek, but the minute Curry gave it a PR-firm-friendly name and a few lines of XML, what many of my pals had been doing (on a really small scale

  • Ok, not to make fun of any site, because mine is certainly more stupid than most, but a blog posting from a blogging newspaper that blogs about the buzz in the blogosphere is not really going to generate any emotion with me on the topic of the decline of geek blogs. Maybe the geeks got sick of their own rants and giving free advertising. Or, all of the once-cool, hip, blogsters have moved on to more interesting things... like Wiki's. Yes, geeks have produced enough hot air causing their own ascension out o
  • the net would be if it stayed the domain of pure geeks and no one else?

    I often feel that these type of articles aren't about signal-to-noise ratio which it implies but about old-generation-vs-new-generation elitism.

    I experienced similiar constant bitching in anime where all the old dogs (80&90s - so not exactly the real old dogs) claimed to have more taste, more intelligence, and more knowlege than the new generation coming on the scene. I usually only noticed the only difference between the two was th

  • Evolutionary Blogosphere (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sundroid ( 777083 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @08:24PM (#13418780) Homepage
    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.

  • The Dave Winer's of the world? (Score:3, Funny)

    by onallama ( 515297 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @08:33PM (#13418821)
    Bob The Angry Flower's Guide to the Apostrophe [angryflower.com]
  • 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 t
  • It'd be worth it just to never see another post from such an arrogant, pompus ass.
    • From (What i gather is his blog) Dave Winer: "Haven't gotten iChat to work with Google Talk yet (tried, but got confused)."

      Holy hell! How can you get confused about something like that? OK, he's new to Macs but sheesh! My mother did it herself, from webbased instructions, and she's no computer geek just a computer user.

  • When I was in my teens and early 20s I was interested in every new tech thing that came out. Nowadays I don't care, if it has any traction, I'll wind up looking at it eventually. For example, I have no interest in the RUBY or Python languages since I have no reason to look at them, and that they're new and cool doesn't cut it any more for me. I do know PHP though, which is relatively new, because it was designed for stuff like Apache/MySQL scripting, and I often find it simpler to do scripting for that

  • I don't agree (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gaanagaa ( 784648 )
    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.
  • Things change! WTF?!!! When did this start? Aaaaagh! It's the end of the world. Things are changing!

  • Hooray. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @09:23PM (#13419005)
    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.
    • Hmm i dunno about this whole seeing naked Winer and Searls fetish thing you've got going.

      i'm gonna have to vote 'no' on this one.
      • ha.. while I'm sure you are just joshing about the Emperor's New Clothes metaphor, you should be aware there is a naked Winer pic floating around, something Winer himself posted. I saw it via the old Winerlog:
        http://static.userland.com/images/llamas/naked.jpg [userland.com]
        And there's a symbol of the whole problem with geek bloggers like Winer. They think the whole world is so entranced with everything they do, they think people even want to see their ugly, fat, hairy, naked body. But most people (including me), having s
  • 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.

  • Slashdot's "sucks index" is higher now than it used to be.
  • Slashdot is dying.

  • "Geek Bloggers" versus "Consumer Bloggers" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mdwh2 ( 535323 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @10:53PM (#13419202) Journal
    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.
  • Just because, everyone else is doing it in their mundane way should stop anyone from being what they are. use NanoBlogger(http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] on your Unix System instead of blogger. That should do!
  • The word has cropped up and everyone assumes they know what it means. But to me it seems that different people have assigned different meanings to the word yet aren't making their definitions explicit, so everyone is talking about the same thing. Does geek simply mean an affinity to computers? To some people it seems that just having a home page or spending more than twelve hours a week on the computer is enough to be considered a geek. To other people it simply means that you weren't popular in high sc
    • I know this is somewhat off topic, so I thought I'd reply to myself with this question. I know some hackers have their own blogs, but it seems to me that most of these self-identifying geeks have never written a line of code. Or maybe they consider HTML and CSS "code". The same thing has happened to slashdot, this website used to be prowling with coders and wannabe coders; now I think most of the hackers have left for the most part. Among the geeks I used to know, "trend" and "fashion" weren't things in
  • Who gives a shit? Really? This has to be one of the most pointless posts on Slashdot I've seen. It's worse than a dupe. How long before this gets duped? What do they take us for? I'm glad I didn't even fucking read it.

    The geeks were destroyed when the dot-com bubble burst. Blogging, including geek blogging, is all about signal to noise ratios. As more people get into blogging, the noise level goes up. Since there is less signal, gee, there must be a decline. It's like saying Hollywood's profits are down
  • 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?

  • All the true geeks have moved on to the true blogs (Score:3, Funny)

    by lord sibn ( 649162 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @01:35AM (#13419664)
    By which I obviously refer to the one true geek blog (found all over the net):

    Bugzilla.
  • 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).

  • Numbers Game (Score:3, Interesting)

    by n3bulous ( 72591 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @09:05AM (#13420660)
    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.
  • with a trendy name. It's like podcasting: the newest phenom that we've been doing for the last decade.

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