You may not remember the time (2001) when these so–called “webloggers” came with a nasty stereotype: geeks and nerds who sat in front of their computer, publicly publishing their daily diary entries to the world wide web; imagining that people actually care about their musings on when machines will take over the earth, pictures of eye-candy, Hugh Jackman, bunnies, or their ex-boyfriend’s own blog posts.
Years later, however, as 2008 comes to a close, blogging has evolved. No longer does it have the stigma it used to have; no longer do bloggers need to worry about earning weird looks from their friends and family when they mention their blog.
Making up the majority of electronic writing today, blogs are used for everything from keeping in touch with family, to exposing celebrities, to providing specific industry news, to pure evil.*
This is an essay about the future of the blogosphere. When I say future, I mean what’s happening tomorrow, not next year. In the world of the ever changing, ever evolving internet, if I tried to write about what’s going to happen next year, I’d already be wrong by the time I added my last hyperlink. So here’s what you need to know about the immediate future, the stuff that’s going to affect you know if you want to get out there and get blogging.
The idea of blogging will always be around, and will continue to grow with the Internet. However, don’t get too attached to your standard blog format, as those may not be around much longer. In short, blogs as we know them are done for.
“What does B.L.O.G. stand for?”
In the world of electronic writing, blogging has become the most popular form around. Lets go over what electronic writing is and what electronic writing is not.
Electronic Writing Is:
- Written content developed primarily and specifically for publishing on the web
- An easy, accessible method of publishing media to a world wide audience
Electronic Writing Is Not:
- A New York Times article copy/pasted onto the web
- E-mail, Instant Messaging, or Text Messaging
- Merely creating text using a computer or electronic device (writing an essay in Word)
- Posts on a forum that includes “lol,” “haxxorz,” or any variation of “1337”
- Online text that isn’t the main feature of a site (navigation bars, descriptions of products on Amazon)
- Twilight Fan Fic
As far as blogs and electronic writing go, there’s no single definition of what a “blog” is. Blogs come in many different url’s and sizes, and can be used for almost endless uses. “The problem is rooted in the fact that a blog has always been a medium... rather than a product,” writes Jason Preston, on his own blog, Eat Sleep Publish, a blog about the future of publishing (Jason Calcanis, one of the blog-gods (bloggods), is actually attributed with the blog/paper analogy, but Jason Preston uses it well). What does Preston mean by product? Here’s his example:
Do you blog?
Why, yes I do. Do you paper?
This is the problem I run into whenever I try to explain what a blog is to my grandparents. It’s difficult because so many people describe blogging as a product instead of the paper we use to publish our material. Unfortunately, I usually end up steering my grandparents into to thinking a blog is some kind of boasty online diary where conceited people post their ramblings thinking that people will actually care and read about their life.
OK, sometimes that’s not that far off.
The Hobbyist’s Field Guide to Identifying Blogs
Blogs as a whole are hard to define. What’s a TV channel? Any definition that you could find to fit Bloomberg, Comedy Central, AND The Home Shopping Network probably wouldn’t be too descriptive. People use blogs for so many different purposes, it’s hard to nail one specific definition.
Here are some basic blog classifications, borrowed from Preston.
CorpoBlogs
CorpoBlogs, or Corporate Blogs, are blogs written by one or more bloggers, usually employees, for a business. Blogging may or may not be the employee’s specific jobs. The blog could even be written by the CEO. Corpoblogs can be great for internal or external use, for keeping everyone up to date on projects. For example, the Internet Explorer Development Team at Microsoft has a great blog that follows news, updates, bugs, fixes, etc., for IE. Corpoblogs don’t have to be this formal, though.
Smart companies will use their blog as a powerful PR tool.
Check out: The Facebook Blog, The Google Blog, Kodak’s 1000 Words.
MediaBlogs
Think of MediaBlogs as the virtual version of a newspaper. Compared to a newspaper with finicky editors who crush your stories and chop down your wonderfully written prose, mediablogs are rarely edited before they hit the intertubes. Sure, maybe a gloss over for typos, but I’m sure that these bloggers spend so much at the computer, that they have the dexterity of Mavis Beacon pros.
Mediablogs focus on the quantity of posts, usually linking to another blog post or website. Engadget, a popular gizmo-centric mediablog, posts over thirty times a day on average. Posts could be as simple as just relaying information from other blogs or even conducting interviews or covering life events, etc.
Different from most other blogs, media blogs are created primarily for profit through advertising on their page. I’m not saying all mediablog founders are greedy, computer pigs solely looking to make a profit, that’s just how they pay the mortgage.
Ever since blogging really hit mainstream in 2003, mediablogs have been on the rise. Powerhouse media blogs have risen, such as Gawker Media, a network of 11 quality mediablogs all owned by the same company. Gathering 20 million unique views, Gawker Media is the William Randolph Hearst of the twenty-first century. (Speaking of which, one of their properties, The Consumerist, is for sale.)
Check out: Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch.
JournoBlogs
JournoBlogs are similar to mediablogs, except that journoblogs are edited for content, and have a sense of actual journalistic standards, like a newspaper. A journoblog is an even better example of a newspaper on the internet than a mediablog; the only differences between a newspaper and a journoblog are that the journoblog can be more topically focused and, of course, the journoblog is made for the electronic environment, while the newspaper are made for... for newspaper.
Check out: The Huffington Post, The Big Blog, The Lede.
Toplogs
Toplogs, or “Topic Blogs,” are blogs, written by any number of bloggers, on a specific topic of interest. Toplogs can be similar to mediablogs, but there are a few key differences.
Toplogs do not/cannot post as many times a day as mediablogs.
Toplogs exist more for the discussion/exploration of the topic than for garnering some green. They’re works of love... but there may be ads to keep things alive.
Toplogs aren’t part of a media organization.
As Preston puts it: “Usually you won’t find a lot of original reporting on toplogs, although you might find a lot of original thought.”
Toplogs are common among industry insiders. I follow a couple blogs of people in various sections of the film industry. Before the creation of the blog, there’s no way I could have had the chance to effectively sit down with the pros in my industry of interest and pick their brain.
Check out: ProLost, John August Blog, MacEnstein.
Personal Blogs (blogs)
Ah, the personal blog, or, the standard issue blog. It’s a toplog about you (the blogger)! This could be your personal diary on public display, it could be just general thoughts and musings. In Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, one surveyed blogger said he uses his “to bake half baked ideas.”
Obviously, personal blogs have one author, and therefore, much less frequent posting than mediablogs, journoblogs, corpoblogs, or multi-author toplogs.
However, personal blogs do have their benefits. You can write about anything you want! You, your dog, or you can just spill some thoughts on the screen and let them float around the intertubes as they develop a little. They’re great for faraway family and friends to keep up to date with your goings-on.
Obviously, the author matters. Scripting News, personal blog of Dave Winer, pioneer of RSS feeds, is going to carry a little more weight than Stan’s personal blog.
Personal blogs also have the potential for the most creative, original, worthwhile content.
Check out: Rabid Space Dog, DigiDave, The Flying Tod Hunter.
Take a Breather
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for sticking through the slow part. Now, things are going to pick up. Here’s a reward: I’m going to beat you over the head with some fun facts.
FACT
Blogs generated 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors in August 2008 alone, according to Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere.
FACT
50% of U.S. internet users read blogs of some kind (State of the Blogosphere).
FACT
12% of US internet users blog, contributing to the 184 million bloggers world wide (State of the Blogosphere).
Staggering.
Now don’t you want to start a blog? Maybe an intimate personal blog to keep in touch with your family and share pictures, events, etc. Maybe an expansive toplog about all things cupcake. Maybe you want to become the William Randolph Hearst of the Interwebs and start a massive mediablog network. Then here’s my suggestion.
Don’t.
Back when the blogosphere was a “fresh water oasis of folksy self-expression,” Blogging provided a great way to get your voice out there, but now, its become almost impossible.
Is Anybody Out There?
Any blogger knows about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, the process of making sure your blog pops up higher on Google’s search list when someone searches for something you’ve spent a long time coming up with a witty post about. It involves writing with keywords, submitting your site to websites who promise to get you into Google’s notice, and getting Google to index your site promptly. It used to be easy. “In 2002, a search for ‘Mark’ ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain,” writes Paul Boutin, former Wired senior editor.
Now, though, its common practice to see sites like Wikipedia in the top three spots for search results. Sometimes, it’s hard for even Boutin to get his posts out, as “cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths.” No matter how much time you spent writing the perfect situation to America’s Big Three bailout issue, your blog doesn’t stand a chance of getting in front of the LA Times, HuffPo, Wikipedia, or YouTube.
If you’re trying to start a personal blog where you can post your thoughts and ideas, the only traffic you’re likely to get is the internet trolls, looking for easy targets. You can’t avoid internet riffraff, no matter how popular your blog is; in fact, the more readers you attract, the more insult commenters you’re going to earn. It’s unavoidable. The only way to escape is to follow Jason Calcanis, who shut down his blog in July 2008 and moved on to something he felt would be better for him: an email mailing list.
Ever since he made the announcement at his press conference (yes, press conference), Calcanis’s email subscription list has been doing pretty well. Currently, over 11,000 people subscribe to his two to five thousand word thoughts delivered directly to their inbox. Calcanis says he made the switch because blogging had become “too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew [him] to it.” All true. Between anonymous commenters and the shear number of blogs big and small out there, blogging has nothing on an email list. Calcanis receives about 100 replies to each post and tries to reply to each response individually, he says.
“Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it. I’d rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation.”
It’s much more personal, you start to build connections, relationships, and most importantly, spark discussion, which is what attracted people to blogging in the first place.
I Had a Blog. Then I Got a Life.
Go to Paul Boutin’s formerly active blog and look at his header. You’ll find thirteen words that might speak more in their brevity than any post he’s blogged.
Blogs ignited in the beginning of the millennium because they provided a quick and easy way to publish material to the world wide web, regardless of your tech-spertise. Blog tools didn’t support audio or video, nor could the internet really handle them yet.
There was a box. You type your post in the box. You click “Post.” Ta-da. Blog post.
Of course, if you wanted a quality blog, you still had to put in time into coming up with solid content instead of blither-blather. Word choice, hyperlinking, sneaking in an alliteration or making sure you don’t fall into monotonous sentence structure is tough. Not to mention brevity. As Mark Twain is too often quoted “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
But soon, uploading podcasts, video podcasts, vlogs, and diavlogs became as easy as typing text. No more hours spent fretting over word choice.
DISCLOSURE: I’m not saying that video podcasts, vlogs, diavlogs, or audio podcasts are better than a text based blog. Usually, it’s just the opposite. The greatest content and material come from the people who think, not the ones who jump in front of a camera and just start spewing, though there are exceptions to both.
Never mind the fact that for each hour you spend blogging, HuffPo, Engadget, and Gawker are racking up as many as forty-five man hours. Encouraging?
And then of course, once you post your blog, you have to wait for one of the Google bots to meander across your site to get that latest post in the search results for people to find, unless you have dedicated subscribers or people search for your blog on Technorati, which instantly indexes your blog posts for searching.
But lets face it. Blogging (I feel terrible for saying this) is slow.
The King is Dead. Long Live the King.
Ok, so blogging is on it’s way out. At least, the personal blog is done for. What are we supposed to do now?
Blog.
Remember, a blog is a medium. You can still blog in the verb sense, it’s just time for a new medium.
Twitter, along with Flickr and Tumblr, are social media networks that have become part of the new “micro-blogging” sector. Twitter is based around one simple question: “What are you doing?” You provide one simple answer, in 140 characters or less.
Imagine Twitter as today’s virtual water cooler. It’s where people get together and share. They talk, they bond, they tweet. You can follow other people’s tweets, or you can browse the Public Timeline, a massive live feed of every tweet tweeted by Twitterers on Twitter world wide.
So why should you stop posting blogs and start posting tweets?
1. Twitter is intimate.
While Twitter asks you to answer the question “What are you doing,” you don’t have to stick to that prompt, just like blogging is used for more than “I ran out of cereal today and when I went to the grocery store, I noticed they redesigned the Fruity Pebbles box.”
Still, there’s something about getting the occasional small detail. “Eating soup? Research shows moms want to know,” Twitter’s homepage reads. Tweet saying you’re working at the local coffee shop, and maybe a friend stop in and say hi. Let your coworkers what you’re working on or when you’re late (or not). Let your clients know when you’re in town. According to Clive Thompson in Wired, “it’s almost like ESP.” Twitter creates what he calls social proprioception, or that sense that allows your brain to know where all your limbs are at any moment. Single tweets as a whole such as “at the doctor’s” don’t provide too much information, but as you follow multiple tweets over the course of time and notice your friend Caroline is going to the doctors a lot, maybe it’s time to grab a can a chicken noodle and swing by. It’s a sixth sense of knowing what’s up with your posse.
Even for the twitter-feeds of people you haven’t met in person, there’s something bonding in little status updates. For example, I found Daily Show correspondent and “And I’m a PC” star, John Hodgeman on Twitter. Currently he’s cleaning out his desk and talking about really old manilla envelopes.
2. Twitter is fast.
Twitter moves faster than LHC particles, faster than the Flash, faster than the blogosphere. Give a quick update, did you just have a revelation? A puzzling, deep philosophical question? Did you just find a long lost leatherman that’s been hidden at the bottom of your backpack that’s been through TSA checkpoints at least twenty times over the past year? Tweet it.
Part of what makes twitter so fast are the enablers: the devices you use to twitter. To upload something to twitter, you can, of course, log on to twitter.com, much like you would to post a blog post. But Twitter, either through its own means or one of many Twitter-centric apps, allows you to also tweet using text messaging, IM, email, desktop clients or dedicated iPhone apps.
How fast is Twitter? During the last batch of fires we had here in SoCal, the firefighters discovered they got more information (quantity and quality wise) from following twitterfeeds of residents than from traditional communication set up for tracking wild fires.
Plus, if you’re searching for a tweet, uploading to Twitter and it’s own search engine are instantaneous, so there’s no time waiting for a Googlebot to crawl over and index your tweet.
3. Twitter is about sharing.
A lot of people use Twitter for forwarding interesting links they stumble across on the internet, or sharing a picture they snapped on and uploaded to twitpic. Even some news sites like CNN have Twitter feeds.
Twitter breaks your bubble, expanding your sense of awareness. I have a set list of websites I visit daily, but their mostly film/video/computer related. Everyone posts stories they find interesting or important. In a way, you’re subscribing to their interests, as they share links. You could almost call Twitter a human powered RSS feed. There are plenty of big stories I miss, but other people on Twitter don’t. Did you know Canada’s government is about to be brought down? This is exactly how the Empire rose to power...
4. But most importantly...
Twitter is 140 characters or less. That’s all you get. That’s all Jason Calcanis gets. That’s all the Huffington Post gets (should they theoretically start tweeting, hopefully not too soon).
You might be inclined to brush Twitter off for just this reason. What can you say in 140 characters or less? Compared to unlimited space on a blog?
Consider cogency.
The great thing about being limited to 140 characters is that it levels the playing field. If you have something to say about Obama’s transition team or the Lame Duck Watch, not even the forty-five writers at HuffPo have a leg up on you. They would still have to say it in 140 characters.
Now the game has changed. It’s not how much you can say, it’s about how well you say it, which puts the focus back on the original, authentic thinking that arose from bloggers back in it’s youth.
Back to Basics
“Blogging is not about perfectionism. Blogging is about intimacy, immediacy, transparency and sharing your thoughts the way you share it with a friend.”
- Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
Unfortunately, modern day blogging has few, if any of these essential qualities the Queen of HuffPo cites, but she may not see them from the other side of her massive journoblog. The truth is, the blogosphere has grown to big to sustain itself. The intimacy is just no longer there. For getting information out there fast, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, all have blogging beat. As far as transparency goes, identity on the internet will always be a problem; with the intrusion of corpoblogs, its hard to sometimes distinguish blogs from PR devices, and we may never rid the internet of anonymous trolls.
So where blogs go from here? What do you do? It depends on what kind of blog we’re talking about.
Personal Blogs (blogs)
If you’ve made it this far into this post, you know the answer. I won’t even make you type Twitter.com in the address bar, just click here. It’s the internet water cooler. It’s the human powered RSS feed. It’s what you want it to be. It’s “to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004,” according to Boutin. Jump on over, and you’ll find plenty of good company, like Jason Calcanis, Rachel Maddow, John Hodgeman, Stephen Colbert, Greg Grunberg (of Heroes fame) and Me.
You can still keep your blog if you want, for long form posts, travel journals, etc. But if you really want to become a great “blogger,” fit it in 140 characters or less. You’ll get extra points.
Toplogs
Follow the personal bloggers on to Twitter. We still want to hear what you have to say about your topic of choice, but tell us a little about yourself, too. Come join the tweetosphere.
Mediablogs, Journoblogs
Congrats, guys. You kind of took over the blogosphere. I’m not bitter, really. Blogs work as a great medium for you. As far as immediacy goes, mediablogs and journoblogs get their stories out infinitely faster than print sources because there’s no waiting to send thing to the press. If something happens, you blog and hit send. I read all about the unfortunate/disgusting Black Friday craziness a full twenty-four hours on The Consumerist before the Associated Press got it to me in print.
Plus, you all sound to be doing well off advertising. I wouldn’t want to suggest you guys shut down and fire your writers in this econopocalypse.
Continue doing what your doing. We’ll continue to read.
Secret Side Note to Journobloggers
Don’t tell the mediabloggers, but you should come join us at Twitter. Not for hawking your stories (you can tell us when you post something new, of course) but to mingle with the people. Journalists today aren’t just bylines on a page, they’re people, too. Get out there in the public and share with us.
Corpoblogs
I’m really not sure about this one. Twitter is about people. You’re welcome of course, but lets not use Twitter for advertising. Use Twitter for transparency. Use Twitter to talk to your clients, to your consumers, to the public, and open up. We’re opening up to you.
22,355 Characters Later
I never responded to Arianna Huffington’s comment about how blogs are meant for sharing. She’s absolutely right. Sharing is one of the cornerstones of electronic writing as a whole, and it’s definitely one of the main attractions of Twitter and other microblogging social media services.
While blogging as a medium may disappear, the idea behind blogging will always exist in the future of electronic writing: “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the internet.”
I can’t predict how. Surely, Twitter will be old news in a few years. Then we’ll be on to something completely different, but the idea will always be the same.
Electronic writing is about sharing. David or Goliath doesn’t matter, just content. The how will change, but the why will remain the same.
Hey! 140 characters exactly. Count it.
* Yes, of course I had to link to the good doctor.
7 comments:
Nearly 4000 words. Why?
3984 actually.
I felt like I had a lot to cover. Blogs are used for a variety of different reasons, and so, they have different futures, so I thought a definition of types of blogs was necessary.
Plus, as I was researching for this topic, I started at one blog and just kept reading and reading. Articles and posts were going up literally the day before we turned our essays in. This is a hot topic right now, and there was a lot out there. I wanted to make sure that people who read the post were caught up with subject, even though by now, it's out of date.
I added pictures and comics as a reward for those who persevere...
Right..... but I think you are ignoring one of the things that was stressed in applying this class to the real world. Chiefly, if you are writing for any publication and they want 2000 words, you don't give them 4000 with pictures.
Good thing we're not writing for a publication then. Just our blog.
As far as the Dave/Raabe thing, I have to admit that it’s ironic that a post stressing the future of online writing lies toward the brevity-rewarding Twitter is much more verbose than all the other essays.
But onward:
Good images, great linking collections, very nice short paragraphs, very suited for online writing, even down to the bulletpoints.
I love the “evil” link and the Twilight Fan Fic. Very funny – you use humor well.
Useful distinction between medium/product.
Nice taxonomy of blogs. And yes, if you only did this, it would not make a great paper, so I understand why you needed more space.
“No matter how much time you spent writing the perfect situation to America’s Big Three bailout issue, your blog doesn’t stand a chance of getting in front of the LA Times, HuffPo, Wikipedia, or YouTube.”:::: An oversimplification, and somewhat mistaken. Certain posts of mine repeatedly appear in front of all of those sites, it just depends on what specific words the person Googles. For instance, just adding a word to that auto search, like anti or review or info or whatever, sometimes ends up vaulting small-timers up to the primo spot (my latest example are my posts on Roberto Bolano’s 2666, which everyone reviewed, but if you search for 2666 book, then my comes up higher than most).
On Jason Calcanis: Why are an email list and a blog exclusive? Part of my RSS feed option allows for people to receive an email, AND the material appears on my blog. Give people the option.
Link to Mark Twain quote.
Difficult to make a pronouncement on the entire medium using just one guy as an example. One guy =/ trend.
Interesting move from blogging to Twitter, but this is still very present, not very future-oriented. Although granted, you did promise the future as tomorrow, not next year.
You have a great voice. You should start your own blog. (Wait, I mean twitter feed).
But is Twitter not as much in competition with Blogging as much as a different medium/format? Because I would guess Twittering about news is always relying and linking to blogs and premier news sites.
Overall, a very fun essay. Very readable and smart and seems to put everything we learned in class (and more) on the page.
According to Calcanis, the email list gave him a more personal feeling in how he interacted with his readership. On a blog, its posted online, so that anybody can find it, read it, comment on it. That's great, but no matter who you are, you're going to attract some random hate comments.
An email list, however, the people who are reading and commenting are only those who are truly interested in what you have to say. Now, this doesn't work for everyone, but for someone with Calcanis's fame, it works just fine. He gets to respond to each email individually (yes, he actually takes the time to do that).
Along with the more personal feeling of email vs. comments (maybe thats just my feeling), email avoids the anonymity that the internet can afford you (to some extent), which keep things a little more honest. Plus, the people who actually follow you via email and take the time to reply to you, probably have something good to say. You're going to get an elevated level of discussion.
Would I get on it? No, probably not. Unless I had something to good say like Calcanis, I'd feel like I was just filling up space in people's spam folders.
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