Is blogging declining? Matt writes:
Laura at Apartment 11D offers an excellent précis
of the ways in which the blogosphere of today lacks much of the charm
of the blogosphere of four or five years ago. I would say that there
are compensating benefits to the new, more professionalized, more
institutionalized blogosphere. But it really is different and the
change has been for the worse in many ways.
Laura links to many comments. I'm more optimistic. Very few (if any) of my favorite bloggers have quit and of course there are some new ones. It's surprising how few of them have quit. (If blogging is so great, why hasn't competition competed away their returns? What about comparative advantage in this sector is so persistent?) The rest of the output you can ignore.
I think we’re seeing the shift from Icunabula to Books. Things are settling in for the long haul (or bloggers are…I guess I’ve been blogging for 8 years or so (the earliest years lost to blogger and then to a database crash). There have certainly been phases, but if the medium works for you it works.
There are search costs in blog reading. I tend to spend most of my blog reading time reading blogs, not searching for new ones. In the past year, I have dropped only two blogs, while I have added about a dozen to my reader. I don’t think that the market for blogging is as competitive as you think.
“This is just another variation of The Good Ol’ Days.”
Sometimes the old days actually were better.
Blogs are in dange of becoming passe. About a decade ago for subtle reasons they displaced the
internet lists of the 1990s, some of which are still around, although now only paid attention to
by their subscribers. The new wave is twitter and facebook, which have shown their merit in the
coverage of Iran, even as they are disjoint and more fragmented than the blogosphere. Sign of the
times is the report that media heavies no longer run to the Drudge Report first, garbage as it has
often been. Twitter and Facebook beat it.
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