Byrne's Blog

02.7.11

Blogs are Here To Stay—Are Bloggers an Aberration?

It’s hard to say when the “blogger” phenomenon peaked. In the runup to the 2004 election, the media meta-narrative centered around “the blogger”—a possibly psuedonymous individual whose commentary was upending the traditional news cycle.

In the next few years, something strange happened: blogs became ubiquitous. But “the blogger” lost influence; the personalities that originally defined blogging never became as influential as most people expected.

I suspect that three forces sapped the blogging trend of most of its strength:

•Social media sites replaced low-traffic blogs.

•The right economic unit for high-traffic blogs is the blog network or the content farm, not the blogger.

•The only use for a blog qua blog is as an extended résumé or biz-dev pitch. Read the rest of this entry »