Is blogging passe?

I may or may not have started a circular conversation on this one.  And what I started may or may not be true. I had noticed that my number of visitors had been steadily dropping for the last couple of months, even though my topics and frequency of posting had not really changed much. Technorati was still ranking me in my usual range.

This puzzled me.  Technorati really measures a blog in relationship to all the others.  If my ranking and so-called "authority" was holding steady it mean that everyone else was experiencing the same thing. I started asking other bloggers--only a small handful--but they all told me that they were experiencing some slippage over the past couple of months.

The last person I asked was Scoble. Asking Scoble something quietly is like issuing a press release. It is his nature and I should remember that.  It isn't that I wanted to maintain a cloak of secrecy on the subject, it's because I'm not certain that I have spotted a trend or that he has.

Scoble posted on the subject.  Then Hugh posted as well, although Hugh spun it to announce the decline of A-Listers, which is different than what Robert or I has said. This would not be true, because if that were happening other bloggers would be on the rise, and there is no evidence of that happening either.

Of course, once something about blogging is declared by Scoble and MacLeod, it is very likely to become conventional wisdom in a very short time. Today I got asked if the apparent decline of blogging refutes "Naked Conversations."  I'll get to that in my closing paragraph.

When I talked to Scoble, I had not yet begun my SAP Global Survey.  The soon as I started posting answers from A-Listers like Scoble and Hugh as well as Doc Searls and David Weinberger, my rankings shot back up to a higher level than I've enjoyed in quite some time.What was most interesting is that my Technorati ranking--you guessed it--has stayed the same.

I have no idea whether or not blogging is in decline or not. Nor so I know whether or not A-lister are sinking further down the alphabet. Many of us would feel relieved if that were to happen. For me, I love having conversations with people and I hate being pitched. So a lower letter would be comfortable.

I am more agnostic than you may think about the rise or fall of blogging. Naked Conversations focused on blogging because, way back in 2005, blogging was the only social media power tool. It's a very different story now. Today, Robert and I would most certainly cover different ground. Naked Conversations, like Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that profoundly influenced what we wrote, championed conversations over message sending. It argued for an interctive internet rather than a static one. It was about the business advantage to listening, instead of just talking. The rise or fall of blogging as a tool is simply an interesting data point along a fast moving bitstream of data points.

Comments

[Douglas Karr]

In a nutshell, nope. What I do see, though, is that the methodology and technology behind blogging is being adopted by mainstream media and companies.

Content Management Systems have integrated blogs, trackbacks, pings, blogrolls, RSS, etc. into their repertoire. And mainstream blogging applications such as WordPress are integrating all the elements of Content Management Systems!

So, while you might see the fall of the power of the A-lister and the independent blog, I'm seeing the mainstream adoption of blogging as a primary technique for marketing your product or service.

It's the evolution of blogging, not the passing.

[Geoff Livingston]

This has been an interesting trail (came via Scobleizer's post today). I think great content will always pull people... so long as you can get in front of them. It may be that bloggers have relied on old mechanisms for getting the word out, and that is affecting the traffic.

[Kevin Hillstrom]

Some of this is seasonal ... in e-commerce, sales in summer are always much less than in winter, maybe the same trends will emerge in blogging.

My readership was increasing like a meteor, until late March / early April. Since then, it has been flat. I can only get traffic increases if I write something exceptional ... a change from the early days of my blog.

I strongly suspect (and this is just my opinion) that the Creating Passionate Users situation (which occurred in late March) will be viewed by history as an "inflection point" in the craft known as "blogging".

I personally think that that incident changed how every-day individuals, folks outside of blogging, viewed blogging. No longer was it a trendy, neat little way for the little guy to get their voice heard. It became the place where people's lives can be impacted, a place where mean-spirited people have a conversation.

Obviously, these are only my opinions.

After that event, your "A-List" bloggers seemed to lose some of the zest for all of this stuff. On the other side of the spectrum, casual readers didn't want to be part of a "conversation" that ends up like it did for "Creating Passionate Users".

Read some of the posts from A-list type individuals from April - June. Things like "Twitter" and "Facebook" became interesting, not blogging.

Anyway, that's my two cents worth. Your concept of two-way conversations overriding brands pushing messages upon folks continues, regardless whether it is blogging or some other platform.

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Interesting Shel.
I've certainly been reading fewer blogs lately. Maybe because it's summer?

I even went and blew away a few feeds today that I almost never read.

That said, I'm reading new blogs as much as ever, and enjoying discovering some great voices I've missed before.

[Meenal]

Hi Shel,

Personally, I'm in two minds. I have to say the rumors of the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated, yet they are lagging behind as 'new' power tools.

No one can deny how powerful they are, but in other ways, they seem like anachronisms - limiting conversation rather than enabling it.

Social networks have an advantage in that they can really cut through noise, and take you where you want to be. Going through blogs, on the other hand, now seems reminiscent of poring through dusty archives - how do you find what's good and what's relevant? This is why I cheered when Hugh talked about the death of the A-list, because it seems like it's our only avenue to find quality "because it's popular", which is a throwback of the worst sort.

I guess what I'm looking for is blog-quality but with social-network horsepower. Is such an overhaul too much to ask for?

[Doc Searls]

Good points. Some additional ones.

- Blogging isn't passe. Its just comprised of a rising tide of participants who are increasingly underserved by search engines, feed agregators and the rest of it. And I say that in full respect of the hard work engineers at the engines have been doing dealing with the spam blogs (splogs) that are polluting those same seas.

- The A-list is a pop culture concept that brings little or nothing of value to the blogosphere. If you're blogging or reading blogs for reasons only of celebrity or popularity, you're turning the blogosphere into television.

- In blogging two things matter above all else: currency and relevance. Google Blogsearch has this one right, though I'd prefer it if they found better results and defaulted to Sort By Date rather than Sort By Relevance.

3) Technorati's time-defaulted search results are better than Google Blogsearch's, in my experience; but I believe its "authority" rankings cause more problems than they solve, because the label suggests more of a caste system than is really there.

[Vikram Rajan]

right when things become "passe" for the sub-culture wherein it starts, it starts becoming "mainstream" and adopted by the masses... case in point, blogging has yet to really become a normal & obligatory part of professional life for my clients: lawyers, accountants, financial planners, real estate, and health experts... the same way that e-mail and "having a website" is.

(Other cases in point: the phrase "web 2.0" or the word "bling.")

so to your point: blogging is yet to become passe for the masses... we're still holding seminars called, "What's a blog?"

~ Vik Rajan
PersonalBrandMarketing.com

[Jane Genova]

Shel, what seems to be taking place is convergence of blogging, video and audio. Chip Griffin has issued a useful 35-page e-book on this. It's called "The New Media Cocktail: How Convergence and the Power of Niches Will Change the Face of Media." You can download it free at www.PardonTheDisruption.

What I'm advising clients is that they get comfortable with video and doing podcasts. Just like I did four years ago, I am going to have to learn new technologies.

[Steve]

It's a seasonal thing. Blogs tend to slow during the Summer. Once kids head back to school and the weather changes more people tend to stop traveling, going to the beach, and hit those computers once again.

June through August are slower traffic months. :D

[Kermit Johnson]

I am a blogging newbie, having entered the blogosphere solely to enhance my real estate website ranking and perceived value. It is too early to tell if I have succeeded yet. I do not know enough to say if the blog industry is on the way down. Heck, I don't even know what "twitter" means, and quite frankly, I am not interested in finding out.

However, after being out in the blogosphere for a couple of weeks, I have discovered that is a vapid, insipid world, filled with marketers, egoists, and shallow philosophers. .

Therefore, I would not be surprised if it goes the way of the trucker's CB radio. Lots of blabberasses.

Blogging up the media is probably like the "too many cooks spoil the broth" adage. If we keep adding more voices, will we get a better chorus? This is akin to the idea that if more people vote, we will get a better president.

[chris]

Does the increasing number of features on social sites like Facebook have an effect on what one might term casual blogging? If you can express your mood of the day/current reading/state of health/whatever in a Facebook sentence, that would be one useless blog post fewer, no? And the casual reader likewise. Leave you with blogging the more thoughtful/detailed stuff, and readers who want to read it.

[Anand C]

Shel, I think this question might be a little bit like traffic to a restaurant VS people's need to eat. The decline in one doesn't necessarily mean dearth of the other.

I wrote a post related to this:
http://inpursuitofzen.blogspot.com/2007/07/aggregation-and-blog-redux.html

Curious to hear your take!