13 June, 2006

The End of Blogging Age


This is the way everything goes, the birth (the beginning), living itself, then at last comes the death (the end), and blogging is not an exception. I will try to explain why I think that the end of blogging will be soon, or at least people will get less interested in blogging.

Blogging is both reading, and writing, people either read blogs, or write and post to their blogs, and some do both reading and posting, but what makes blogs attractive is the ease of creating a blog, writing and leaving comments, even publishing a blog is now much easier through blog aggregators, such as Jordan Planet (JP), or other websites that offer other services such as blogger, and jeeran, which give all-in-one solution for bloggers, all that convinced people (bloggers) to create and maintain their own blogs, and become bloggers, they do that because there is what I call the personal experience of blogging, they see themselves in their blogs.

I have recently visited many blog websites, or aggregators, and noticed that there are a big number of blogs, than the number of bloggers themselves, then I tried to find out the number of visitors of those blogs and what I found was that less than 10% of the blogs have 85-90% of the number of traffic (number of visitors), and the remaining 90% of the blogs only lives on a little number of visitors, that was shocking.

Bloggers write because they want others to read what they write about, not just for having fun, and if they believe that no one or very few visitors read their posts, many of them will stop writing (blogging) sooner or later, and by time blogs number will shrink, and there will only be those 10% blogs that most of people read, and blogging will be like newspapers, very few number of newspapers, compared to blogs, will leave people with only limited choices to choose from, many bloggers will find soon that they can't keep their blogs running, as nobody is interested in their blogs, they will lose what I called the personal experience of their blogs, and because people in general are not patient, they will give up blogging.

That is why bloggers use tools to know the number of people who visit their blogs, and lately bloggers began posting surveys, to get a real feedback, and in my opinion, some of them want to improve their blogs, that’s why feedback is very important for everyone, and some others want to check if they will stay in business (I mean blogging).

Blogging itself will not end, people will continue reading blogs, and see it as an alternative of typical newspapers or media, but interest in blogging will die and end soon, as blogging will be to them as a source of information not participation, or contribution, people will become readers of blogs, and they might leave their comments on others' blogs, but not bloggers any more, and that is what I mean by the end of blogging, I think blogging bubble will stop get bigger than what its now.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

As with everything, there are people who pursue it with a lot of passion. and people who are there just for the cool factor. Once the cool factor subsides, they lose interest because basically they're just not cut for it.
Blogging is not something new. I have maintained websites in one form or another since 1996. And I'm still doing it. My passion goes through cycles usually, very productive sometimes and pretty much nothing for a while. It all depends on family circumstances. But The truth is, Blogs are about to hit their golden age now. No longer is it a cool thing for people who really know how to setup servers and register domains and have their own DNS servers like it used to. With the advent of services that allow you to do that in a few clicks and ready made themes and templates it became so brain dead to the point that so many people just go ahead and try it. Many fall in love with it and just can't see life with out it.
Blogging is the natural evolution of diaries. As we rely less and less on paper, people continue to feed the growing phenomena. If you noticed, blogging is for people of all ages with a huge interest from the younger generations. I think blogging is gaining momentum and soon will reach a critical mass which means that it will never stop. (at least not in the foreseeable future.
Blogging will also evolve to become more audio and video driven to the point that it's going to be just a matter of speaking what you want and it will end up being on your blog. The next step will be blogging from anywhere, people grab their cell phones, and instead of taking notes they start blogging their minds directly ... the future looks promising for blogging ;-)

Anonymous said...

i have 2 admit i hated blogging, im not sure till now!! thats what m trying 2 find out, but i find the idea that some people become so attached 2 blogging and cannot live without it a negative thing, and a bit shallow, how a person might identify his/her self with this while there's alot more to life.
and yes its true blogging is growing fast these days, and quaider, some people do post directly through their mobile phones already!

Anonymous said...

I do lammoush, but I'm not the main stream ;)
What I wanted to say was, Grab phone, start talking, and all gets nicely blogged for you. Pretty cool huh?

Anonymous said...

"but i find the idea that some people become so attached 2 blogging and cannot live without it a negative thing, and a bit shallow, how a person might identify his/her self with this while there's alot more to life."

Lamoush, Well said...I totally agree...But, you know? sometimes people find it easy to hide and start writing stuff that make them worry or sad...I find it sometimes a way of treatment :) But I totally agree taking such a thing into its extreme isn't good at all :)

Anonymous said...

asalam 3alaykom,eyad..i'm happy i stoped by..realy nice post..
i can't realy know what others think of blogging and wether they will loose intrest or not but i realy realy think that it's a possitive way to interact with people and their various types of expriences..
but mainly i'm into this because i have something to say and this is a facility for me to say it..in life i do call for faith too..it's my devotion and
i'm very attached to my call and don't realy see how is that hideing behind words..
i want to argue and debate and have a civilized open conversations with willing people..
to me it's enriching and benefitial..
and i hope it never dies..
enough deaths for valueable matters.