The blog is dead. Long live the blog!
In what is clearly an attempt to teach schoolchildren the true meaning of irony, a C|Net blog announces that the blog bubble has burst. They base this on Technorati’s highly respected State of the Blogosphere report which noticed that although the overall number of blogs is increasing, the number of active blogs has reached a plateau of around 15 millions. The facts are true- lots of blogs are falling silent every second, enough to balance out the growth in blogging. Tris Hussey thinks growth will pick up again once blogging gets a second wind, but I’m not so sure.
This is what the alleged bubbleburst look like:
I think that blogging, as a medium and as an occupation is approaching saturation. That is, the field for blogging has become pretty full- by now, most people are at least aware of blogs, though the mainstream media, Myspace, or friends. And almost everyone with the desire and ability to start a blog and maintain it regularly has already done so. Blogs have faced explosive growth these past few years, and explosive growth is hard to sustain for anything.If you think about it, the number of users who have picked up creating content is already astounding. 15 million active blogs is a huge number. Over the past four years, tens of millions of citizen journalists have found their voice and began writing, and hundreds of millions more have started to create content by commenting and participating in discussion. How many other professions have shown growth of tens of millions in a period of a few short years?
That doesn’t mean that the blog bubble is bursting or that, blogs are about to become extinct. We’ve got 15 million people writing actively on
every topic imaginable. Nobody is complaining of a lack of anything good to read or, on the flipside, lack of a potential audience. It is far too early to sound the requiem for blogs. Right now, 37% of blogs are in Japanese and another 36% in English. Blogging may have oversaturated those two markets, but it is still waiting to explode in others. Just wait until blogging becomes mainstream in China.
Blogging is far from dead. With massive international growth looming and millions of people creating tons of content for the first time ever, the blogosphere is very much alive and kicking.
Others:
- Lee Gibbons notes that its only natural for blogs, as a new technology to get swarmed when first hitting the market- accounting for the massive growth so far.
- Eric Berlin is correct in saying that quality is far more important that quantity.
- Andy Beal says the growth could be attributed to people trying blogging and, having discovered social media, moving on to other platforms
- Lots of good comments on Valleywag as well- including this one, my favorite:
A probably all-too-typical example of an abandoned log: I ran across a blog about a person’s attempt to get fit. After several months, this person quit both exercising and blogging.
And now all that’s left is a publicly-accessible record of failure. The blogosphere is riddled with such shipwrecks.
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Thanks for the link love! The other point I was making is that it is also natural for the hyper-growth created by the hype and hipness to cool. Twelve years ago, you had to have a .com website. Seven years ago it was instant messaging. Starting two years ago, it was a blog. Now it is Twitter. With each there is a cycle of “everybody doing it,” then the next thing comes and the pragmatic reasons for continuing it continue as strongly as ever, but the rate of growth, driven by the buzz, tapers off.
Sorry if this is stating the obvious, but I really don’t see any reason for the hand ringing that is going on. Like you say, “Blogging is Dead. Long Live the Blog!”
– Lee
Thanks for coming by, Lee. I try to link out to other people talking about the same thing with every post- it helps create a truly dynamic and diverse conversation, which is what blogs should be all about.
You draw a great parallel between blogs and Twitter as the next fad- I can only hope that 140-character twitters do not completely supplant blog posts as the medium of choice.
Ilya thank you for the linky love too!
While I agree with your and Lee’s premise about the “hot” technologies exploding onto the scene, I’ve also seen technologies…like the .coms…grow stronger and better after the “bubble bursts” and everyone gets a chance to take a breather.
Agree with Lee Gibbons. The cycle’s always been the same hype -> burst of growth -> plateau. It’s also partially because some of us have gone on from blogging to creating social networks, to twittering and whatever else is out there to distract us. If you’ve got twitter and then jaiku (for mobile) it might no longer be necessary for you to blog to tell your friends what you are up to
Why bother trying to get your friends to read your blog when you can just use something like Facebook notes or your MySpace blog?
What kills blogging is blogging that is integrated with social networking that the social network you already have already uses.
To echo the common refrain, thanks for the link love!
I just responded to a comment on Online Media Cultist by writing that: I’d love to see some kind of measure of “quality” of the blogosphere, even though it would be highly subjective. My sense is that the quality of the blogosphere keeps on rising dramatically, that people go to the blogosphere first for news and opinions more than ever before, that blogs are meshing with traditional media more than ever before, etc. That’s why talk of the blogosphere’s “declining health” simply baffles me.
I think other platforms may be having an impact. Think the latest twitter craze, or blogs on social net sites as engtech says. It’s all blogging though, just in different forms. Is it possible that it’s the metric that’s lagging?