Comments on: Why the Blogosphere is Still a Growth Area

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:25:00 +0000

If you mean that web pages will have syndication feeds for update alerts, and people will use stripped-down content management systems, sure, I can see that.But that doesn’t necessarily mean much for “blogging …as a cultural or technological movement”. I can see it being used a bait-and-switch, where “blogger” is used to mean “unpaid pundit” in one sense, for the coolness factor, and then switched to mean “use of any tool or syndication feed”, to pump the numbers (which happens now).From the standpoint of the idea of challenging media, there’s a pretty good argument that has indeed peaked and is in decline, which is not rebutted by the fact that more people are writing diaries. There’s certainly going to be some more opportunities for media slots, and even a company or two. But it’s even more the domain of standard industry types, just slightly different ones.

By: Kent

Kent — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 19:33:00 +0000

I understand that, once you factor in all the abandoned blogs, the growth rate is declining.My point is that a slowing growth rate can be explained mathmatically, is to be expected and certainly doesn’t indicate that blogging is on the decline as a cultural or technological movement.I’m just constantly reminded of the mid-nineties when someone would say “you know Kent has a web page,” like it was some exotic thing. I get the same vibe today vis a vis blogging.If anything, I think in 10 years when someone talks about a web page, they’ll be talking about what we call blogs today.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 18:21:00 +0000

Regarding: “This is one of those questions where the goal is not to find the exact answer, because the exact answer cannot be found.”Not at all. There’s a perfectly well-defined answer. When does the number of active blogs being abandoned exceed the number of newly created blogs? (note carefully – this is a *rate*, I did not say, “no new blogs will ever be created”, it’s the *RATE*).This actually wouldn’t be a hard question to answer from a blog-tracking service. But I doubt any would be willing to answer it, since the real answer would be hype-deflating.