Am I a Blogging Zombie?

About every 6 months or so, the "blogging is dead" meme comes round (last time there was a major outbreak was in June). Well, here it is again - articles from my in tray from The Economist and Nick Carr. One would have thought that being dead once already this year, being so twice would be careless, even for a Zombie!

But essentially they are saying the same thing - blogging, as we know it, is shifting towards mainstream media - big blogs are staffed by teams of blogonists, are Ad funded (with all the issues that entails), have increased Pagebloat (there are some blogs I don't read any more because of that) and indulge in the practice of blogonanism* (self linking).

In fact, whisper it who dares, but the big blogs - in true Animal Farm nature - have become the pigs they once abhorred. Of course, it was ever thus. Nick Carr gives the example of the Radio Hamateurs in the Interwar years:

As amateur broadcasting boomed, utopian rhetoric soared. Popular Science wrote, "The nerves of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one." The amateur broadcasters, the historian Susan J. Douglas has written, "claimed to be surrogates for 'the people.'" The democratic "radiosphere," as we might have called it today, "held a special place in the American imagination precisely because it married idealism and adventure with science."

But it didn't last. Radio soon came to be dominated by a relatively small number of media companies, with the most popular amateur operators being hired on as radio personalities. Social production was absorbed into corporate production. By the 1920s, radio had become "firmly embedded in a corporate grid," writes Douglas. A lot of amateurs continued to pursue their hobby, quite happily, but they found themselves pushed to the periphery. "In the 1920s there was little mention of world peace or of anyone's ability to track down a long-lost friend or relative halfway around the world. In fact, there were not many thousands of message senders, only a few ... Thus, through radio, Americans would not transcend the present or circumvent corporate networks. In fact they would be more closely tied to both."

Those that cannot remember the past etc...........

Apparently now that raw, first impression style of early blogging is taking place on "microblogs" such as Twitter. But having been on Twitter awhile, it is my view that it is also growing up - it went from inane to interesting, but it seems to increasingly full of self promoting PR types....but the joy is you can Turn Them Off!

Now we were (relatively) late to blogging, starting in 2006. (Well thats not true, actually - we dabbled with it in 2002), but - as with Twitter in its early days, didn't bother to participate because it was basically cr*p content - people making asinine observations about trivia. And like Twitter did (at about this time last year), blogging started to become more interesting c 2005 - frankly, because more people started coming on board and they forced the conversation quality up a few notches

So where does it go from here - well, in my view the Ham Radio story is probably not quite the endgame, as blogs - in my view - are more like magazine content, as (i) it is higher grade than Radio conversation, and (ii) it is persistent. Thus, I think blogging will have a series of outcomes:

- Big Magazines - The Huffposts, TechCrunches etc. There will also be rationalisation. I don't bother with more than one in any segment. In fact, imho their quality is declining as they take on armies of poorly paid bloggers - I don't have them on my RSS any more, I read Techmeme as these blogs just push out too much content. I prefer The Economist, NYT's Bits and a few others as frankly, the people writing are better. On my RSS now I mainly have....

- What JP Rangaswami calls "Small Cap Blogs" (Like Nick, JP etc). As Sun's Tim Bray notes:

...mid-level individual presences such as my own having a few tens of thousands of readers, and with regular outbursts of blog-to-blog conversation. I'm not sure what the right word for this landscape is, but I'm pretty sure that "dead" isn't it.

These will cover everything that magazines today cover, and more.

- Niche Blogs - smaller blogs addressing micro interests

And as both Nick and The Economist note, some people will continue to write web diaries (the original blog type), but most will be aggregated onto Facebook and similar social platforms simple because its easier.

And where are the avant garde today? In my view they are on Videoblogs like Phreadz, Seesmic, Qik et al.

*That was a self link, by the way