Blogging: Part One - Has Blogging Plateaud?
The Fat Kid decided to stop his musings and Bosh decided to blog about it. Now I'm blogging about Bosh's musings. That's the way most internet memes are passed: Idea sparking idea. The idea at hand is whether blogging has reached a plateau or not on its way from cutting edge to mainstream.
Let's look at some events in the blogosphere in the past week. In the Wall Street Journal we have an article about job openings for bloggers to earn big money blogging for corporations. Wil Wheaton, Mr. Wesley Crusher himself, blogged about having mono and feeling pretty lousy, and a brand new site opened up heralding the arrival of blogging into the mainstream with its own A lists, B lists, and C lists of Blogebrities. The WSJ article lists salaries of $40,000 to $70,000 blogging about yogurt and popcorn. I suppose some would say that blogs geared at helping people feel good about dairy products or snacks are a far cry from blogging's edgy roots in personal expression and experiences. Then again, only celebrities could get people to be interested in whether they are feeling well that day or not. You can't get much more personal than that, and Wil had 143 well-wishers respond. Then speaking of celebrities, Blogebrities is such a buzzworthy concept that the latest issue of Time magazine gives it coverage. Too bad the entire site is a spoof aimed at winning a contest over at Contagious Media. Whoops. But we don't expect well researched facts in our news anymore, do we? At any rate, blogging has become mainstream. Even my own father called me a few months back all excited for me to get in on this blogging thing since people were making money at it. He didn't know I already had one, but I appreciated his excitement. I was finally doing something on the web my dad could identify with - something he had heard about from the financial sector. (Not that I'm making much money at it. Do my dad a favor and click on those Google ads, will ya? They really do help.)
So, blogging has crossed over into the mainstream. For some that takes all the fun out of it. Once muggles get involved the air is let out of the Cool balloon. Others look at it as a plateau that has been reached with no other directions left but down. I propose that the blogosphere isn't plateauing as much as it is evolving. Although it was once a close knit community of either tech heads or tortured souls, blogging was bound to transform and mature as different voices saw blogging as a tool. Then blogging reached critical mass during the last American election when political blogs became a powerful force instead of a ragtag bunch of crackpots - so powerful now that the FEC wants to regulate them.
For those bloggers who have been blogging for years all this evolution can be distasteful. Blogs about yogurt don't have any teeth to them. Some might even question what is the point of blogging for yogurt or popcorn. You want to eat the stuff, not read about it. And as seemingly banal as a celebrity blog on mono might be, you can't blame Wil Wheaton for being popular. He could blog about a ratty hangnail and he'd have hundreds of concerned posters. If he and his readers want to commiserate together about mono, sniffles, and what brand of kleenex is best, that's their business.
Perhaps some bloggers are running out of things to say, becoming bored with the process like the Fat Kid, or just craving the next thing like Bosh, but I don't see that endemic of the entire blogosphere. I like Bosh's blog and I hope he feels the urge to continue to post his opinions. There's still room for new ideas. Some, obviously, are better than others, but the same freedom that gave the early bloggers a voice exists for everybody else, too. I'm OK with that. Blogs, like iPods, are on their way to becoming ubiquitous. When everyone is blogging it won't have the same cachet. However, I still have plenty of things to say and blogging's popularity doesn't change that. Perhaps I'll find a larger audience one day that is actually interested in reading what I have to say (more on that next time). A blog about overcoming neurological disabilities is a tough sell, but if people are going to read blogs on yogurt, insurance, car sales, the latest wonder drug, somebody's hangnail, and who knows what else, then I can make room for my voice out there. And when the current wave of popularity washes out to sea, the blogosphere will change again with the times and discover new relevance. People like Bosh and I may be off doing the next thing then (I love podcasting), but I believe there will still be blogs in some form or other as long as people have the urge to express themselves in writing.
Let's look at some events in the blogosphere in the past week. In the Wall Street Journal we have an article about job openings for bloggers to earn big money blogging for corporations. Wil Wheaton, Mr. Wesley Crusher himself, blogged about having mono and feeling pretty lousy, and a brand new site opened up heralding the arrival of blogging into the mainstream with its own A lists, B lists, and C lists of Blogebrities. The WSJ article lists salaries of $40,000 to $70,000 blogging about yogurt and popcorn. I suppose some would say that blogs geared at helping people feel good about dairy products or snacks are a far cry from blogging's edgy roots in personal expression and experiences. Then again, only celebrities could get people to be interested in whether they are feeling well that day or not. You can't get much more personal than that, and Wil had 143 well-wishers respond. Then speaking of celebrities, Blogebrities is such a buzzworthy concept that the latest issue of Time magazine gives it coverage. Too bad the entire site is a spoof aimed at winning a contest over at Contagious Media. Whoops. But we don't expect well researched facts in our news anymore, do we? At any rate, blogging has become mainstream. Even my own father called me a few months back all excited for me to get in on this blogging thing since people were making money at it. He didn't know I already had one, but I appreciated his excitement. I was finally doing something on the web my dad could identify with - something he had heard about from the financial sector. (Not that I'm making much money at it. Do my dad a favor and click on those Google ads, will ya? They really do help.)
So, blogging has crossed over into the mainstream. For some that takes all the fun out of it. Once muggles get involved the air is let out of the Cool balloon. Others look at it as a plateau that has been reached with no other directions left but down. I propose that the blogosphere isn't plateauing as much as it is evolving. Although it was once a close knit community of either tech heads or tortured souls, blogging was bound to transform and mature as different voices saw blogging as a tool. Then blogging reached critical mass during the last American election when political blogs became a powerful force instead of a ragtag bunch of crackpots - so powerful now that the FEC wants to regulate them.
For those bloggers who have been blogging for years all this evolution can be distasteful. Blogs about yogurt don't have any teeth to them. Some might even question what is the point of blogging for yogurt or popcorn. You want to eat the stuff, not read about it. And as seemingly banal as a celebrity blog on mono might be, you can't blame Wil Wheaton for being popular. He could blog about a ratty hangnail and he'd have hundreds of concerned posters. If he and his readers want to commiserate together about mono, sniffles, and what brand of kleenex is best, that's their business.
Perhaps some bloggers are running out of things to say, becoming bored with the process like the Fat Kid, or just craving the next thing like Bosh, but I don't see that endemic of the entire blogosphere. I like Bosh's blog and I hope he feels the urge to continue to post his opinions. There's still room for new ideas. Some, obviously, are better than others, but the same freedom that gave the early bloggers a voice exists for everybody else, too. I'm OK with that. Blogs, like iPods, are on their way to becoming ubiquitous. When everyone is blogging it won't have the same cachet. However, I still have plenty of things to say and blogging's popularity doesn't change that. Perhaps I'll find a larger audience one day that is actually interested in reading what I have to say (more on that next time). A blog about overcoming neurological disabilities is a tough sell, but if people are going to read blogs on yogurt, insurance, car sales, the latest wonder drug, somebody's hangnail, and who knows what else, then I can make room for my voice out there. And when the current wave of popularity washes out to sea, the blogosphere will change again with the times and discover new relevance. People like Bosh and I may be off doing the next thing then (I love podcasting), but I believe there will still be blogs in some form or other as long as people have the urge to express themselves in writing.
Comments
Bloggers 'outing' corrupt media and politicians attracted the money moths, and the race for the blogspace was born.
Only today, I received this in my inbox, demonstrating perfectly that every nobody on earth will be blogging by this afternoon. It surely is depressing. Apart from anything else, that article is telling down right lies - lies that are willingly believed by naive people in search of, in this case, a good search ranking. At least yoghurt exists, not like a transient ranking, here today, gone tommorrow. Even del.icio.us is now full of mythical 'blogs' about pressurised water servers, fireproof roof tiling and selling techniques that WORK! It's begun to have an effect - I don't use del. in the way I used to.
The thing is, people are out there who are mighty bored with mainstream media. We all get up in the morning, catch the news via our fave web news sources, and bit by bit, the 'real' media is losing ground. We don't believe in the glamour of media anymore, we want ordinaryness. We are more likely to trust a regular blog than many mainstream news articles - let's face it, they are usually bought and paid for, to say the least.
I'm glad Douglas came along to my page, he's encouraged me to keep slugging away, which I will do. But I'm still going to do my bit to be part of the vlog revolution, as long as I can avoid those annoying vacation reels......
/bosh
I visited that site and I do see your concern. This is a dishonest site posed as an informative article. The guy who wrote it works for an SEO company. The article was written to generate as many keywords and buzzwords as possible while still sounding coherent. I admire his alacrity and skill to tackle the subject, but if I did some research I'm willing to bet all those ads on his site are from clients his company represents.
The site is built to increase his clients page rankings while posing as a "How to" article for blogging n00bs. How is this dishonest? Well, he promises a chicken in every pot for anybody who posts once a day. He's grossly exaggerated the financial benefits of blogging. I feel sorry for the poor shlubs who hack away daily on their blog thinking that easy money is just around the corner due to this guy's advice.
I post once a week and I have six, count them, SIX regular subscribers. Of course that fluctuates. I del.icio.us every blog entry, ping all the major blog listing, and post comments on other people's blogs regularly. I spend hours on my blog entries editing and reediting trying to make them informative and funny. Six subscribers. Is my subject matter inane, boring, off target? Not for the people who have left comments. But making a successful blog is not only about daily posting. It's about connecting with a community. And you can't do that successfully if you're only in it for the money.
It's true I run ads on my site. They help to defray my hosting costs, but I'll be honest. My blog earned maybe an 18th of what my fractal site brought in last month - a whopping $1.26. And I haven't updated the fractal site in months while I slave away on this one. I'm not in this for the money, that's for sure.
You are right to a degree. The invasion of MLM schemes, corporate shills, and gold diggers is poisoning the blogoshpere. It will become uninteresting before long to the mainstream readers who are first discovering blogs. I dare say it may even tarnish the image of blogging. Google will have to change how it ranks blogs to filter out the adsense whores and ranking shills. I suspect the signal to noise ratio will degrade even further making it even more difficult for relatively new blogs such as mine to get noticed. But all growth has its pains. The commercialization of blogging is one of those pains that we'll have to deal with. It was inevitable.
But I am heartened to hear that you will keep slugging away at your blog. We need unique and sincere voices in the blogosphere more then ever now.
As for vlogging, I am sorely tempted. I just haven't thought of a hook yet that will snare me into the next time eater. LOL I'm with you. Vacation and home movies should be left out of the vlogging revolution. :) I've seen some terribly dull vlogs out there, but there's enough exciting video work being done to pique my curiousity and keep me coming back for more.