I crashed into this post today over at the blog herald - which makes some interesting and quite valid points, but is missing a few key elements in it’s logic that skews the authors summation..
Perhaps an initial quote is in order:
Geek blogging is in decline. If you don?t believe me, take a look at the Feedster 500 or Technorati 100 today and compare it to the Technorati Top 100 over the last few years. Take a look back in time to the top 10 in the Techorati Top 100 on November 26, 2002 and you?ll see the generation of founding geek bloggers dominating the list: Doc Searls, Dave Winer?fast forward a year and things have started to change.
There’s a few things I want to say about this article, as well as where I beleive the posts author has made an assumption of the death of geek blogging rather than realising a more logical explanation - growth.
Yes, they have started to change - more people are blogging (that’s a pretty big give-in). Technorati (particularly bad right now) and Feedster (to a lesser extent) also cannot easily differentiate between godfathers such as Searls, Winer, etc and the current massive festering boil that is “spam blogging”. Those feux blogs can take reasonably valid data and turn it on it’s ear.
I note that Feedster seems to be in clean-up mode, however Technorati still has a massive spam blogging contingent. Lets also remember that blogging is an evolving media - blogging has a very high growth rate. The founding fathers are still there - and they blog frequently still.. and newer faces simply provide more of what readers want - rather than what bloggers think readers want. The top 6-7 spots in the Feedster 500 are very geek - more reader choice in my mind does equate to less geek.
Another quote:
.. its just that their audience will continue to shrink in relation to market share in comparison to other existing, and yet to be written blogs.
Again, correct - however that doesn’t mean geek bloggers have stopped - rather there is far far far more blogging content now, than 2-3 years ago. Never underestimate the growth potential of ‘new’ media technologies - podcasting is a fantastic example of massive growth which has massively increased consumer exposure to podcasting. That has had the downside of impacting on the likes of Adam Curry, Dawn and Drew, etc, who have been podcasting since time immorial perhaps aren’t as well known now as 6 months ago.
I can recommend the article - it’s a good read, but ringing the death knoll for the founder fathers of “teh geek blog”, let alone geek blogging itself , is a little early, yet.
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of design, geek, reference.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
Feedback is encouraged. If you would like to read more, consider subscribing to the regularly updated RSS Feed.
