February 19, 2006
Blogging Is Over; Long Live Blogs
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
How do we know blogging is over? As Daniel Gross points out in Slate, it’s the subject of too many magazine articles, media conglomerates are spending too much money on it, early investors are gleefully cashing out, and “the clueless and the greedy” are rushing to the trough in hopes of grabbing a few leftovers.
To which I say: thank god. This whole “Web 2.0″ bubble has been an irritating sideshow, a tired retread of the mid-90s being played out by people who should know better.
The problem is that too many people are associating “blogs” — a simple interactive publishing tool — with “blogging,” the overhyped media sector. And then it all gets lumped in with all these other so-called Web 2.0 tools.
And then those people completely miss the point that what’s interesting about all this is a change in mindset toward user-created content — how they do it (through blogs, “tagging” applications, vidcasts, whatever) is almost immaterial. Tools are going to come and go. We can talk about del.icio.us and Technorati and Flickr and blogging platforms until we’re blue in the face.
But the only really interesting phenomenon out there right now — what’s bringing it all together — is MySpace. It has over 56 million members and growing. It has 50% of the web community market (10 times more than any other single site, including Yahoo, Craigslist, and LiveJournal). Its traffic is neck-and-neck with Google. (reference here)
It brings all that other stuff — photo sharing, blogging, videos, audio — into one place. And the ease with which it allows groups to form puts other web community sites to shame. (Think MySpace is just a place for teens to hang out? Then check the “Business & Entrepreneurs” category in groups. Sure, lots of junk, but also some rather active groups for business owners and professionals.)
MySpace doesn’t get a lot of respect from the Web 2.0 types because it seems like a lot of juvenilia (and it was bought by Rupert Murdoch) but they don’t seem to have noticed that it’s already done much of what they want to do — on a huge scale. Whether it lasts and grows, or completely falls apart, doesn’t even matter. It’s created an experience that is going to shape the expectations of an entire generation.
Weren’t blogs also just considered juvenilia at first, too? Now looks what’s happening.
What I’d really like to know, though, is how the social networking “expections of an entire generation” (and, I would add, those of many of us older types who are into this sort of thing) are going to effect the association world. I can the whole old way of doing things imploding, but I’m not sure what could take its place,when people in essence are building their own associations that ebb and flow based on changing interests, ones that they can create and control and change at will, instead of having to go through boards and committees and all that.
What do you see happening? Any predictions for associations 2.0?