Imbeciles and fools unite

I hope someone can appreciate the irony that I am linking to this Wall Street Journal editorial with this post. Read on if you are curious.

WSJ Assistant Editorial Features Editor Joseph Rago has strong criticisms for bloggers. We’re bottom feeders, for one: (I suppose that’s a harsher way of describing the Long Tail.)

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps … The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Honestly, I think he’s probably right. Meaningful content is a challenge for those of us who blog for enjoyment rather than for a living. So many blogs are created and then abandoned, and most of us (including me most of the time) are responding to news generated by the mainstream media, not sharing new information.

Rago playfully refers to bloggers as fools by quoting author Joseph Conrad. Blogs are, in his opinion and Conrad’s words, “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles.” I wonder if this is the whole truth, though. Will it always be this way? If blogging is peaking, as has been recently reported, will the cream rise to the surface of the crop? As Technorati has pointed out, “sheer dedication pays off over time” when it comes to blogging, and that may mean that blogging will improve as serious writers stick around and continue to get better at it. Let’s hope so.

The Blogosphere is falling

According to research company Gartner, Inc., as reported by the Associated Press, blogging is so 2006. Or, at least it will be soon:

Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so. One of the research company’s top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.

The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Plummer said. “Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

I’m curious to see whether this pans out as Gartner expects, but they may well be right. As Technorati frequently reports, only a fraction of blogs are regularly updated. Technorati estimates that 55 percent of the 57-million-plus blogs it measures are “active,” meaning that they have been updated within the past three months. I hardly consider one post within three months active. Only about three percent of blogs update daily, though that’s a pretty high standard of activity. Weekly seems like a better balance to me, or at least monthly.

I think the point above about not having something to say is accurate. In searching for available blog names, I was amazed (and frustrated) by how many good names were taken by blogs that had not been updated in years. So many of them had one or just a few posts before the silence began.

I’m curious to see what this means for blogging in general. Even if the number of new blogs and bloggers plateaus as predicted, will blogging recede from our collective consciousness. It’s awfully mainstream at this point. It seems like nearly everyone I know is at least familiar with blogging and have visited at least one or two. Many people I know are read blogs fairly often, so I don’t know that the blogosphere is about to implode under its own weight or anything. Of course, Gartner isn’t really predicting that, but their prognostications do leave me wondering where all of this is heading. I guess we’ll see.

Intent to engage

I’m of the opinion that there’s little point to blogging (or any communication, really) unless you sincerely desire to engage an audience. I think that’s why so many blogs, up to 97 percent according to a recent Technorati study, are abandoned. Blogging consistently takes a commitment, and I wonder if most people who start don’t really realize that when they post their first message. (Granted, I’m a newbie, having only been posting on any blog since February and on this one since August. Hopefully I’ve passed the burnout threshold.)

I thought these words from U.K. newspaper The Guardian’s Emily Bell hit the mark (thanks to Mark for the link):

Embracing a medium does not mean just copying a format, it means understanding the rules of engagement. Gordon Brown has what might be a blog, but which he hasn’t updated since June 18. While this is pretty appalling in terms of reaching out to the blogging community, it does have a level of authenticity about it – it is clearly something he was made to do but abandoned when he went on his summer holidays and hasn’t been back to since.

No doubt between now and the next election the increase in politicians blogging will be like lemmings falling off a cliff, but a word of advice if I may. Unless you have an inner blogger – don’t bother.

I think what all of this goes back to is authenticity. People naturally crave what is genuine; we crave the truth. If someone isn’t willing to put all of themselves into something they do, especially something intended for public consumption, why should anyone else pay attention?

Blog Math

Technorati released its latest “State of the Blogosphere” report this morning. What strikes me about the report is how much blogging is not happening. Look at these numbers:

• Technorati is tracking about 57 million blogs right now.
• Half (55 percent) are considered active, but “active” means they have been updated one time within the past three months. That does not seem active to me.
• That figure means that 25.6 million blogs are outdated and not being used. (I think that is a conservative estimate.)
• Technorati tracks 1.3 million blog posts per day. That seems to indicate that only a small fraction of the 57 million blogs update even once per week (at best it would be 9 million blogs).
• Of late, the number of blogs tracked doubles every 236 days.
• At least 100,000 blogs are created each day, more than one per second. Using the numbers above, that means that roughly 45,000 blogs are being created every day that will ultimately be abandoned and just sit dormant out there on the Web.

I want to examine this in a subsequent post in more detail, but this report supports a notion I’ve held for a long time: The Web is only an effective communication tool when you commit to consistently using it to communicate. If you don’t, you’re just filling (and wasting) space.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for alerting me to this report’s release. (This is a solid communications blog, if you are in the need for one.)