dog or higher

Why blogging as we know it is over

As someone who has written this blog for several years now, and read blogs for longer, I've been pondering the shape and changing nature of blogging for a while. Mostly based on how I read blogs, and how this has changed over the time I've been doing so.

Not for a moment do I think that in the future there will be no blogs. But one aspect of traditional and contemporary blogging which I am going to predict will not be so nearly strong a pattern in "the blogosphere" in coming years is people reading blog posts based on the poster. In effect, people will be much less likely to subscribe to and read particular blogs.

Just a couple of years ago the number of blogs was substantially fewer than today. So it made sense that, like in the early days of the web, we could rely on people (just like Yahoo! when it started) to filter out good blogs, interesting blogs, and we'd read and subscribe to blogs recommended and read by the bloggers we already read. Harshly, though not entirely inaccurately termed a "circle jerk" by some, this created a power law distribution in terms of readership, where a few sites had a huge audience (the A List) and a great many sites had very few readers. This pattern, once established, tends to be stable. Which is in the long term fatal to the pattern, and so to the health of blogging generally.

This distribution of readership is largely a function of the blogging distribution mechanism - RSS feeds. When people first start using RSS and reading blogs, they tend to subscribe rapidly to many feeds, but subscribe to fewer and fewer new feeds over time. And where do people find new blogs to read ands subscribe to? The other blogs they read.

Think about your own blog reading patterns. How often do you add new blogs to your feeds? Pretty infrequently I'd guess. Certainly, that's my experience, and anecdotally the experience of people I know.
How often do you unsubscribe a feed? Probably even more infrequently than you subscribe to new ones.

So, once a blog gets in someone's list of feeds, it tends to stay there.

Which would explain why the A Listers don't tend to change over time too much. Over time, most popular bloggers tend to blog less, so as a consequence link to other blogs less. Mostly unconsciously, the A-list has kicked the ladder out from behind them. The mechanisms that made popular bloggers popular no longer work for newer blogs. In essence, as we've learned before on the web, people don't scale.

So this is one sense in which "blogging as we know it is over". The whirlwind of overnight sensations in the blogosphere, which let's face it was part of the excitement, both as a reader, and a blogger - "hey, maybe I'll be the next Kottke" - really can't happen anymore. And as established bloggers blog less, the dynamism of the blogosphere ironically diminishes, despite its massive growth in pure numbers of blogs and blog posts.

Sure, this is all handwaving, but I can imagine some simple research which might confirm my anecdotal theories - for example, asking a service like Feedburner what the churn rate of feeds is, what the take up rate of new feeds is, how frequently new users of their system add new feeds, as opposed to established users.

But does that mean the blogosphere will suffer a long slow heat death, as fewer and fewer new blogs create buzz, and established bloggers post less frequently?

I actually think a different use pattern will emerge, one less focussed vertically on blogs and bloggers, but more horizontally on individual posts. The question is, how will people find these posts, if it isn't via other bloggers recommendations?

Just as the massive growth in the number of sites back in the middle 1990s meant that humanly created directories like Yahoo! and LookSmart, and even the distributed Open Directory project didn't scale, and software took over finding and recommending sites to read, I think software intermediation will become the key distribution mechanism for blog content.

People will subscribe to automatic RSS feeds, which return results of searches or other processing, for example popular posts at services like Digg. Already at Technorati, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts with particular tags. It doesn't seem that you can subscribe to the results of a search, but I guess either I can't find how to do it, or it's in the pipeline.

Now, the rumours that Blog searching has been retired at Yahoo are interesting. What Technorati do better than anyone is real time search (particularly of the blogosphere), which I suspect will become an increasing competitive advantage (because I suspect it's hard). Google's searches are anywhere from hours to days or weeks after content is posted, from what I can tell, depending on the popularity of the pages, except for specialist aggregators like Google News, but currency is all in blog searching, because this morning's posts are old old news for most blog readers by afternoon.

So as the prediction season commences, here's my first prediction for 2007 and beyond. People will subscribe to and read fewer blogs by specific bloggers, and more individual posts on subject areas of interest, fond using tag and keyword based searching of latest blog posts, or of popular stories, as determined by Digg, delicious, magnolia and so on.

I also reckon this will raise the quality of blogging, as competition or readers attention will shift from blog v blog, to post v post.

And another thing...

My fervent hope? Comment whoring dies a death. Note in particular to the mainstream media as you adopt "blogging" in a pathetic effort to remain 'relevant' - A blog is not a mechanism for generating flame wars, and the number of comments on a blog post is as likely to be a measure of how bad the post is (deliberately polemical, or deliberately written to maximize the number of comments) as how interesting it is. Let's leave that nonsense to talkback radio where it belongs, eh?