Death

• Nicholas Carr, author of ‘The Big Switch’, wrote a piece today on his blog about the death of the blogosphere.
• This isn’t the first time I’ve heard it this year, but here is the argument in a nutshell:
  • “Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion”.
• As with anything popular, some parts will enter the mainstream, especially if it involves original news. One could make the distinction that once a blog enters the mainstream, that it takes on the definition of just an online newspaper with a distributed staff. Let’s take Silicon Allley Insider for example. They are now an online newspaper and the only thing that they hold true to the blogosphere is that they post in ‘reverse chronological order’ (the definition of a blog). But, what is the answer to this so-called death? If you think that it’s micro-blogging, you’re wrong. As we are seeing with the growing popularity of Twitter, even micro-blogging has entered the mainstream. If you ask me, Twitter is often times far less personal than a blog. I have to limit my characters and many times the people i follow are just syndicating an update from somewhere else (like a blog headline). Sorry Nicholas, as I have said before, it’s hard to call something dead that really has no definition and spans so many personalities, genres, formats, groups, etc. Maybe it’s mainstream, but what are you reccomending we do? Podcast? hah, right.

RoughType, Performancing.com, Furrier.org, Economist and Valleywag

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