There is much talk amongst these things called blogs about their place. Dave Winer makes an interesting point about their utility being in the narrowness of blogging. Craig points us to some less optimistic opinions which reminded me of my posting five months ago comparing blogs and CB radio. I don’t know if I have changed my mind about the heights to which we can expect this format to reach – but confusing the role of blogs with the quality, resources and journalistic standards found in newspapers and other quality professional media with what are at best partially informed personal opinions has certainly inflated the idea of what can be achieved through a digital soapbox [being a two-foot tall block of wood that only places the speaker in a position of audibility to a slightly larger tiny crowd].
That being the case – and somewhat regardless of it – it appears to me that the sun always sets and that this form of discussion, too, will die. Here are some of the factors I think will kill off blogs:
– Spam – sooner or later the Nigerian investment set will realize that stripping out “reply to” buttons rather than email addresses will give them another automated means to spread the word. In addition to this, you are seeing more and more random manual acts of insipid replying such as this. At some point, either the bots or the tangential may overwhelm the reply to buttons and the patience of authors. This would merely be a repetition of what happened to usenet and is happening to email so it should be expected to expand;
– Aggregating reading apps – many readers of many blogs use applications that tell you that your favorites have updated. There may come a point that these apps become the means by which the vast majority of reading is done. This is somewhat anti-thetical to the authors point of view that this-space-and-content-as-my-space-and content – I expect you to take in the entire site as a whole. By decontextualizing my newest comments, a reader is having a different experience than intended by the writer. If I notice much misconstruing of my observations in replies and their linking on other blogs, I may just get turned off writing in this way;
– writers may just become bored – writers of blogs may tend to be optimistic, needy manics of some degree and the new is great fodder for that condition. Some dream that they are participating in an agenda, either politics or technology. If the return on the emotional investment in the dream is not there in the long term, authorship will simply die off; and
– the great catch all – a new unanticipated technology will arise which will draw off activity.
My point? Dunno.
None