Wired has this week published an excellent essay about the changes we have seen in the blogosphere in recent years, with the central premise being that the blog is now ‘dead’. That is to say that the time of true blogging, in the sense of a DIY non-commercial method of mass communication that offered the levelest playing field for all voices alike, has well and truly passed.
The Times online responded with the more moderate view that blogging has merely changed, though this view seems a little superficial when one considers the degree of fundamental difference between modern web 2.0 blogging - and the ‘old school’ approach of four or five years ago.
The Wired article is pretty straightforward in its assessment of recent trends. Basically, blogging has now become a primarily commercial activity linked in most cases to processes of either advertising or SEO, (or both), - in any case underlined by the bottom line, so to speak.
The most-read blogs today are those using professional teams of writers delivering as many as twenty or thirty posts a day, easily drowning out the ‘bedroom blogger’ who in times gone by had a far greater chance of achieving widespread readership and a global audience. (See Technorati for up-to-date info on the Top 100 most read blogs)
Remember the incredible success story of Aint it Cool News back in the days of clunky old web 1.0? Harry Knowles was a film buff with a computer who managed to achieve an amazingly large fanbase through the DIY medium of blogging; certainly original voices like this would now find it far harder to get noticed.
Of course all this seems rather inevitable when taken in the wider context of the web’s total and all-penetrating commercialisation. One could say that blogging has simply followed the same path as everything else, and ask why this isn’t being welcomed?
After all, the commercial blog is a great thing in many cases, offering as it often does a free online magazine, written usually by very interesting and skilled professional writers. This is something surely to be celebrated both for readers, who now have access to far more in-depth and professional content, and for full-time writers who now stand a reasonable chance of making a living from their work.
However we must not forget that something valuable has been lost; the amazing breadth of different opinions and ideas that the uncommercialized blogosphere offered has sadly narrowed drastically, even though the portion that remains is now infinitely better.
Ultimately the issue is whether an adequate replacement is out there. A mass-communication tool that is free and democratic in terms of potential access to audiences, rather than one where reader numbers are a product of financial investment (with each month the blogosphere assumes more and more of the characteristics of other more traditional mass media outlets, requiring money to get heard).
Wired suggests Twitter and Facebook are currently providing free and open platforms for those expressions now lost amid the professionalism of the mature blogosphere, at least until they too go the way of the blog.
Ultimately though we have lost a certain totality in terms of the democratization of the net in giving expression to all individual voices, but we have also arrived at a situation where a genuinely good blogger - even if working alone - can through hard work find a way to make a living from such work. It might mean that the more casual alternatives are lost amid the busy traffic, but on the whole I can’t imagine anyone would honestly say they prefer the choice of content offered in 2003 to that available now (even if the principles governing it then were slightly more democratic).
Dejan Levi