Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself.

{ deletia }

When people post an article on a blog these days, the conversations are occurring offsite. The blog link could be submitted to Digg, Mixx, and/or FriendFeed, and conversations may occur around the topic on those sites instead. The original blog post, meanwhile, has 0 comments.

{ deletia }

If no one is commenting on the blog, will the blog lose readers? Will the blog lose traffic? ^{^}

A look at history demystifies this situation. (I’ve taken the liberty of deleting social commentary and leaving hard fact in the above excerpt.)

Blogs were, around 1996-1999 or so, a rarity because they were mostly personal avatars. I credit Jorn Barger for having taken the blog in a new direction. Robot Wisdom is every part of the news media fused together: news stories, human interest, science and society with an eye for stuff outside the Britney and flag waving that characterizes CNN.com, for example.

Now, blogs are commonplace, with just about every business having one. I encourage this among my clients. There’s no easier way to post information than the short, informal, quasi-journalistic blurbs of a blog.

However, now that there are so many blogs, the aggregators like Slashdot, Digg and social networks are what rule because there are very few blogs with all the information one wants in one place. It used to be that you read four newspapers and distilled the results in conversation; now you read 12 blogs through your RSS aggregator.

How the blogosphere will adapt is going to be interesting. I think that, much as Twitter functions as an aggregator, more blogs will start to exist as link posts where a dozen or more sources are summarized daily with minimal comment. Maybe Twitter and blogging will fuse as the ultimate short information blurb — a half-paragraph plus link. Whatever the case, it’s a change in blogging brought about by the success of blogging itself.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under Information Technology, Meme Trafficking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.