...and so we face the final curtain?

Dave Winer thinks the End is Near (referring to the race to be big media by the Big Tech Blogs)

I pulled out of the tech industry and started blogging in 1994 or 1997 depending on what you count as the start so I could get away from the crap. Now Mike Arrington is talking about turning TechCrunch into CNET. That's a sure sell signal. Get me the f*ck outta here. Beam me up Scotty. This isn't Kansas anymore Auntie Em.

His chief ire is raised because he feel all the main blogs, and smaller ones that comment in this space, are an echo chamber - pointing to this piece why there is Little Original Thought on blogs:

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge. It takes time, thought and effort. The problem, however, is many bloggers are often short of time, which means it is difficult to come up with insightful thoughts. As Louis Gray talked about in a recent post, many bloggers are time-strapped what with blogging and being on other social/content vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, RSS readers, etc. If you’re doing all that, when do you have time to think Big Thoughts?

Is it dreadfully unoriginal to comment on a post? Broadstuff has been going for c 18 months now, and I have a few thoughts on this. In our case, time strapping comes from client work - but this also yields original thoughts and analysis - but that is not a daily occurrence - so we post that stuff when it comes. But quite often you see someone writing something, and you can see you can add something to the story, or you have an angle - and that imho is vaild.

2. Many bloggers just want to be part of the conversation before it moves on. Here’s what happens in many cases. You see a hot story and you’re keen to jump in but not willing to simply leave a comment on someone else’s blog. Solution: Pound out a quick, no-frills post that makes you feel good about being on top of the hot story even if it’s piling on. I’m willing to guess that 50% of the posts about a red-hot story on Techmeme (e.g. Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo) were posts that just parroted the news reports.

As noted above, I think if you have a point of view on a story, then it is valid to blog. If you are just noting something without moving the story on, why not just post a link? When to blog vs when to leave a note is interesting - if its more than a paragraph, I blog it. There are also a number of "blogs" where you can't comment, so thats fair game for blogging.

3. Writing original content often provides a low return on investment. Let’s face it, traffic is what drives many bloggers, which explains why checking your stats on a regular basis is a key part of blogging. When you write original content that falls outside the hot news of the day, there’s a good chance it’s not going to get much love or traffic.

How come? The biggest reason is everyone is spending so much time reading or writing about the big news of the day, your original, thought-provoking post gets buried. As a result, it’s easy to think “Why put so much effort into writing quality content when there’s instant gratification (and traffic) by jumping on the bandwagon”.

Yes and no - what I've found is that original content doesn't have a quick burn, but over the months those posts garner traffic and are a large source of links - and the occasional pickup and re-hash by the odd A - List blog even

4. Unless you blog for living like Mike Arrington or Erick Schonfeld, or you’re a tech reporter like Mathew Ingram or a conference junkie like Robert Scoble, you don’t have steady access to people and new ideas that often spawn original blog posts.

Actually, the blogosphere has a lot of original stuff coming out of it - if you don't just look on Techmeme . I do find an increasing amount of interesting links also come from my Twitter community now.

I also think that Dave et al are guilty a bit of bemoaning the passing of the older days.....and the rise of new names, new blogs etc. And it seems commenting on others has been around awhile...

Back in the old days before any of you were blogging, we (the olde skool bloggers) used to write about them watching us watching them watch us watch them. Permalink to this paragraph

It's happening again...

Nothing wrong with it, it's human nature.

Ecclesiastes Law strikes again