Rumors of blogs' demise are exaggerated

Maybe you've heard: Blogs are a vanishing fad. Or a business bubble about to pop. Or a sucker's bet for new-media fame seekers. New York magazine cast cold water on newly minted bloggers' dreams with an examination of the divide between a handful of A-list blogs and countless B-list and C-list blogs that can't get much traffic no matter how hard their creators work. Slate's Daniel Gross spotlighted signs that blogs may have peaked as a business. And a much-discussed Gallup poll concluded that growth in U.S. blog readers was "somewhere between nil and negative."

The latest word from Dave Sifry, CEO of the blog search engine Technorati, is that there are some 28.4 million blogs and the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5.5 months, but other Technorati numbers show that less than half of those blogs are still getting posts three months after their creation, and less than 10% - just 2.7 million - are updated at least weekly. That means of Technorati's blogs, more than 90% are either abandoned or updated too rarely to merit the name - nothing kills reader interest or visits more quickly and thoroughly than a stale blog.

Blogs will be everywhere in the near-future, but singling them out amid the Internet tumult will seem odd. But blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they'll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation. Blogging is easier, faster and more conversational than traditional Web publishing, but that doesn't change the fact that relatively few people actually yearn to be publishers. Nor do they particularly care what category the things they read fit into, or what technological tools produced them. That may not sound like the stuff of revolution or VC riches, but it also doesn't sound like a fad or a failure.

(2006-03-03 16:37:59 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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