Comments on: End of the Personal Blogger

By: K

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:05:25 +0000

There sure was a lot of currency placed in the myth of the "democratization" of the blog, and the notion that Old Media didn't control information any more, because any Joe Schmoe can start a blog. And yeah, that worked in the early days, perhaps, for Matt Drudge and Rob Malda and a few others. But New Media is now just behaving like Old Media, and the power of the individual is nil next to the gangs of cool kids getting all the attention.

But I was whining about this years ago.

By: Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Have you been following this discussion?

(link)

By: Alexander Grundner

Alexander Grundner — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting take on the state of personal blogging. I agree with you that the sites who are getting the most publicity are the ��pro�� or ��collaborative�� style blogs. The only explanation I can give you for this underrepresentation is that personal blogs tend to cover a wide variety of topics, dashed with personal biases and emotions, which may not be as attractive to the corporate types. On the other hand, blogs by analysts and industry folks should be recognized as quality information outlets and be regarded as alternative news sources. The only trick is for these types of sites to come across as legitimate Web properties, like GigaOm ;)

By: Jonathan Schalliol

Jonathan Schalliol — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Waaah! Whaah! Whaah!! Poor baby. Suprise, no one wants to read your personal stuff. Perhaps the plague will finally end. Sure, if you’re Stephen Hawking or some other famous person people care about, you’ll get readers in quantity, but why would someone expect that the whole world would be interested in “some guy.”

By: Om

Om — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Jon you clearly miss the point. its just that if a blog has a professional sounding name, it is okay to be indexed by news sites, while its not okay for a personal blogger site. I mean there has to be a similar standard. I could not care less if they list me or not - i have my own audiencce, thank you very much and I have acquired them the hard way: writing stuff that matters. I think what I am trying to bring up is a legitimate issue that faces the blogsphere, as it grows up.

By: Alexander Grundner

Alexander Grundner — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Om,

What would be your solution? It seems that trying to decide who fits into what category is very subjective, especially due to the many variations blogs have taken.

I also agree that award sites like 2004weblogawards.com and the Webby Awards are crap. If they really wanted to do a good job in selecting blogs for a particular category, they should:

1.Let readers submit their favorite sites

2.Let users rank the final list and narrow it down to the top 10

3.Poll the users to decide who the winner is (��Reader Choice Award��) and have an in-house panel pick their winner from the top 10 list (��Critics Choice Award��).

FYI - the Webby Awards charge Web Publisher $195 to have a single site considered ($150 for additional sites - (link)
byawards.com/entries/new.php).

By: Dylan

Dylan — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry, but I have to ask the obligatory, “So?”

Who cares if your blog shows up in Yahoo or not? Or Google News? I’d be probably safe in saying that a very, very high percentage of bloggers could care less where their blog shows up in whatever directories are out there.

You say it’s the “End of the Personal Blogger”, but what do you really mean? Do you mean, “It’s the End of the Personal Blogger Who’s Goal is to be A-List”? Or, “It’s the End of the Personal Blogger Who’s Trying to Make a Living off Blogging”? If so, your take on why people blog is pretty skewed. I don’t have the definitive answer on why people blog, and nobody else does either, but I can guarantee that it’s not to get themselves listed on Yahoo or Google News.

Why does there have to be a “standard” for what kinds of blogs get indexed by news sources. Blogs got where they are by people doing whatever they want and specifically not conforming to a standard. Trends exist, yes, but they are fluid just like so many other aspects of blogs.

Lay down a standard for what gets indexed by news sources and all you get is another fixed media construct. People will break away from it and “do their own thing” exactly the same way bloggers have broken away from the long-standing corporate media constructs.

By: Daryl

Daryl — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps it could be the fact that the number of personal bloggers has exploded so much that somehow people have stopped trusting them as sources - and so the news sites in response have stopped indexing them? I know that it’s just a veneer, there’s no real difference, but for some of those people looking at the ’source’ of the info, it matters.

Or maybe it’s just that these news aggregators assume that corporate-run blogs are filtered through an editor, and are wary of hearsay? Again, an assumption that may not be true, but that may still underlie the preferences.

What’s weird to me is that many media corporate brand names are actually just personal names: Bloomberg, Reuters, the Associated Press (okay, kidding on one of them).

By: Om

Om — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Dylan and Daryl, thanks for your insightful comments. I think you make valid arguments, but since I can speak from my perspective, here is what I think. So for news aggregators to get link some and leave others doesn’t make sense. either they make a standard policy around it - blogs okay, blogs not okay - and stick to it. but the issue and perhaps i was not clear is that blog with a pro-sounding name but of inferior quality is all right, and other with an am-sounding name with better content is not good enough. that pisses me off.

By: Erik Lane

Erik Lane — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a personal blogger and I’m not real interested in being found in a google search or what have you and I probably have 2-3 readers at most…so what? I do it for me and it’s pretty neat to have a place to write about things that interest me.

Most blogs I read are of the personal nature. There are a few “pro” blogs I read like Scoble (how I got here).

By: Charlie O'Donnell

Charlie O'Donnell — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Most of the content we see on the web will eventually get streamed in some capacity, and the big guys will definately be able to show big numbers, but that doesn’t mean the individuals will be less important. Volume isn’t the only name of the game–relevance and proximity are important, too. Blogs are key tools for networking and the sharing of individual wisdom… in the same way that when you go to a tech conference, somtimes the most useful information you get is from the guy sitting next to you in the audience, not necessarily the CTO of a big tech company. You can’t replace the value of shared wisdom among practicioners in a particular industry, especially industries and niches where scale won’t justify a dominent entry into the space from the content perspective.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

If you think that’s bad, you ought to be a UK-based weblog owner.

Kanoodle, for example, refuses to consider my website for inclusion simply because I’m based in the UK even though the vast majority of visitors to it come from the USA.

By: Alexander Grundner

Alexander Grundner — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

BusinessWeek Online just posted “The Business Of Blogging” through Yahoo! News.

(link)

Good read and relates to what we’re talking about here (sort of).

By: Dean Landsman

Dean Landsman — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The answer is in the clicks. (Hmm, that sounds like an early 60’s Phil Spector song, but I digress, you know, like I do on the blog . . .)

Google (the general one) spiders and finds just about everything. On DeanLand I get a few hundred hits per week from Google, Yahoo, MS and other search engine queries. I write a personal blog, commenting on Pop Culture, New Tech, Communications and anything else that pops into my mind and comes out of my fingers onto the keyboard then up to the blog.

There are a few Deanland links out there on blogrolls, permanently poised to be sending the occasional curious clicker. And the referrer logs show considerable traffic accumulating from these sources. Most of the blogroll clickthroughs come from Doc Searls, RageBoy, Frank Paynter, Jeneane Sessum, and a few others.

The fact that Google News and other services have ass-backward old paradigm or other such block-the-growth maladies that prevent them from being as inclusive as possible (they just love rules, and rules tend to manifest themselves as exclusionary principles) is just a peculiar aspect of the rules getting in the way of the game.

But the answer, as above, is in the clicks. Here I sit, your basic B-List blogger. But the clicks keep coming, people keep reading, and I keep writing. Am I a star, a household name, or, gasp!, a wannabe A-Lister? No, but none of those are reasons [for me, anyway] to be blogging.

I simply write out of an urge to do so, and have somehow managed to cultivate some semblance of regular readership, plus a good many unique/one-shot clickthroughs, and some people who visit on a happenstance or irregular basis.

Over at DeanLand I have been and remain a personal blogger. Am I listed in various directories or texpert (not a typo) listing? For the most part, no.

That I have been at it for a good few years and remained a (semi)regular poster of new entries explains how some places do, indeed, list me. Most of the aggregators have something about DeanLand, and a good many of the blogging tools that list blogs have mine in there.

We are in the day of the expanding the ever-exponential growth medium, this distribution method known as blogging. Add to this pages that are not necessarily blogs, but are updated and parts of sites where there is personal comment (much like blogs, but not bloggish, per se) — and there it is: items that will show up in the clicks.

RSS and ATOM add velocity and identification, particularly in the page- or topic- (even paragraph-) specific URLs created in the process. So there is a speedier chance of clickthrough on items with a permalink or RSS identification.

Again, to repeat it for the last time (but we all know that repetition is crucial for getting the point across — shall I say that a few more times?): the answer is in the clicks.

Personal blogging and bloggers are not gone. They may appear to be a lesser pecentage as more topic or professional area blogs emerge. But let’s not call the personal blog a dinosaur — or a chia pet– just yet.

After all, if the practice is fading away, would that make DeanLand chopped liver? Perish the thought!

By: Shareen

Shareen — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I think that blogging has finally become more mainstream. It has emerged from the underground and just like Starbucks versus the really-nice-coffee-around-the-corner, bloggers with contacts and other resources will emerge as the fittest to survive.
The fact that Sitemeter is instaled on most sites, linkexchanges, increased Google-savvy, Sex and the City-like blogs by women, show that individual bloggers are as eager for hits as their larger counterparts. So it isn’t accurate to romanticize the death of the little blogger.
May the best win, but my guess is that those will probably be the bigger fish.

By: umair

umair — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Great post - something I have been thinking about a lot.

I think blogonomics explains this - response at the link above - enjoy!