Tech & Biz

Blogging: A Burstable Bubble?

by Jordan Yerman | April 27, 2007 at 12:57 pm

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I was gonna post this on my blog, but I kinda don't feel like it.

But seriously, I think that blogging as a zeitgeist will definitely have a shelf-life, but purpose-based blogs and serially-updated watchdog sites will live on: basically, blogs with no reason to live will eventually die as bloggers tire of telling the world what they had for breakfast.

A new article in BusinessWeek says the numbers are pointing to a plateau in active blogs. The magazine is using stats from Technorati for the analysis, which found a decline in the percentage of blogs that are active compared to the total number of blogs tracked by Technorati.

It's a familiar pattern--millions of people got excited by blogging and set up pages of their own. But after a while, they grew tired of maintaining them--or moved on to newer social phenomena like MySpace or Twitter--and let their blogs go silent. Does this mean blogging has joined the ranks of "mature" media? And is that good or bad? The bloggers who are still around are debating the issue.

The sort of blogs that will live would include boingboing.net (a viable business at this point) violatedrights.com (an NP contributor and civil rights activist), consumerist.com (consumer advocates). Blogs likely to perish include jettrash.blogspot.com (my own!).

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a_strems

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 16:29 on April 27th, 2007

this is a really worthwhile online discussion. i think it is definitely right to think that the personal blogging bubble is ready to burst BUT niche blogging is here to stay. people still want human sites talking about specific things to read, search and subscribe. there is cash in very niche blogs so i doubt they will be stopping any time soon.