It’s a little disappointing, that only a few months after I start my Hiconomics.com blog… someone comes and claims the blogosphere has been killed. Nevertheless, there is a lot of truth in the matter, and this post by Nicholas Carr, summarizes a notion already pointed out by the Economist, The Register and other sources.
In essence, the point they’re all making is that blogging’s venture into the commercial mainstream is what signals the death of the blogosphere, especially to the early pioneering bloggers. Carr compares blogging to amateur radio, which kicked off in the early 20th century when the public took to the airwaves with their own broadcast, and how the main radio-stations shape the remnants of that movement.
Blogging indeed seems to have been taken over by the mainstream media, as a vehicle to interact with the public, as a platform to share news in less formal ways, and as a way of increasing content with SEO intentions. But I’m sure this is the natural progression and evolution of blogging… after all as with anything that starts off with the best, purest and most innocent of intentions, if there is some lucre behind it… the mainstream kicks in and commercializes it.
However, as a platform for sharing with your peers, colleagues and friends blogging is still around and will continue for a long time. The costs of blogging are virtually free and as long as you can establish an audience (or even a percieved audience).. then people will continue to blog, write, upload pics and share. I probably won’t go as far as saying the blogosphere is dead, but it does look like we’ll need to separate the commercial and professional from the personal blogs.
On a comic note, it seems the need for clarity and separation of these blog types is further emphasized by this incident in Germany where the Nationalbibliothek (National Library) is looking at cataloging the entire local web. This initially caused some excitement and anxiety before they confirmed that they were “talking to [newspaper and magazine] publishers about their sites, and we’re interested in blogs by people in public life – but not in every site of every private individual.”
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