Blogging is dead; long live blogging

The Economist put out a short arti­cle on Nov. 6, com­ment­ing on Jason Calacanis’ retire­ment from blog­ging. Calacanis founded Weblogs Inc., and the Economist com­pares his retire­ment from blog­ging to Michael Jordan leav­ing bas­ket­ball. It is, in other words, a big deal.

Calacanis left blog­ging because he felt like it had grown too imper­sonal. The direct con­nec­tion with read­ers and com­men­ta­tors was gone, replaced by big, anony­mous, “impor­tant” arti­cles designed to keep his blog on the A-list. This was not what he wanted out of blog­ging, appar­ently, so Calacanis retired, mov­ing to a large e-mail dis­tri­b­u­tion list to keep his ideas flow­ing into cyberspace.

This hap­pened some time ago. In fact, I remem­ber read­ing about it almost a month ago, it seems. Calacanis’ depar­ture shook up the blo­gos­phere, which has gone decid­edly main­stream. The big blogs, the pop­u­lar blogs, are all run by media com­pa­nies now, updat­ing, as the Economist points out, faster than any solo blog­ger could from home. And now these big blogs have to worry about the same sorts of things that worry big media, namely adver­tis­ing rev­enue and attract­ing readers.

“Blogging has entered the main­stream,” says the Economist, “which — as with every new medium in his­tory — looks to its pio­neers sus­pi­ciously like death.” Indeed, few small­time blog­gers will ever attract much in the way of atten­tion or vis­i­tors with­out the help­ing link of a major site like Digg.com or Boing Boing. The small voices, which is what blog­ging was sup­posed to be about in the first place, can­not make them­selves heard (some­thing I am painfully aware of at times).

Some sug­gest that Twitter and Facebook-type microblog­ging is the wave of blogging’s future. Microblogging — post­ing tiny updates about your­self, brief thoughts to be con­sumed in a few sec­onds, posted many, many times a day — is actu­ally more akin to blogging’s true roots as Web log­ging than the essay-like posts we see in the blo­gos­phere today. Perhaps these kinds of ser­vices are where we’ll find the next gen­er­a­tion of inter­est­ing peo­ple fir­ing off mes­sages to one another and pro­vok­ing new thought.

So whither blog­ging? The Economist sug­gests that, like PDAs, blog­ging will become ubiq­ui­tous. That is, it will be every­where all the time, and its pres­ence will be so incon­spic­u­ous that we’ll hardly notice blog­ging any­more. Rather than being a sort of polit­i­cal state­ment about your occu­pa­tion — “I’m a blog­ger”; “I blog” — a blog will become noth­ing more than another medium, a way for infor­ma­tion to reach the masses. Blog will cease to be a verb and retired to the com­fort­able world of com­mon nouns that nobody pays much atten­tion to.

There are still going to be good blogs out there. Remember, rock and roll “died” a long time ago too, and there are still good musi­cians mak­ing good rock music today. And, just as with the afi­ciona­dos who hunt for “good” music, the peo­ple who can find the good blogs in this blog-noun future will con­sider them­selves bet­ter than the peo­ple who con­sume the main­stream tripe.