Why Blogs Won’t Die (from: Ensight - Jeremy C. Wright)
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2005/03/08/why-blogs-wont-die/ | Comments
I’ve been thinking about the question “is blogging a fad” for months now. Everytime a journalist asks, which is basically every other day.
Initially my response was “I don’t know” or it was “sure, but that doesn’t mean companies that find value in it won’t keep it up”. And sometimes my response was even longer, like at the Napa NewComm Forum.
Recently I realized that I was thinking of blogging the wrong way. I was thinking of it as a business tool. And all business tools have a fairly finite “hype cycle”. They hit their peak and then they become boutique and niche services.
The problem is that blogging is really a communications medium. Like the letter, the telegraph, the fax, morse code, the phone, email, webpages, SMS, IM and VoIP (to name a few). And the reality is that communucations mediums that hit the mainstream don’t simply die. Heck, they often don’t even evolve beyond their initial state - mainly because it requires upgrading every user to do so. It took 20 years to go from analog phones to digital, for example.
Communications mediums are generally fairly static and stagnant. They don’t really die, they simply get replaced. Smoke signals replaced by morse code, replaced by fax, replaced by email. Or something.
Blogging has now established itself as a mainstream communications medium. Roughly 50 million bloggers. More than 200 million blog readers. That’s more users than Linux, more than Apple, more than the iPod, more than most major religions, more than the number of day traders, firemen, lawyers and doctors.
Anyone who wants to say blogging is only for a “select few” is looking through a very different kind of glasses. And those glasses probably don’t allow them to see blogging in relationship to their favourite little pet project - be it open source software like Firefox and Linux or cool services like Skype and Vonage.
The numbers behind blogging are huge. I don’t say this to navel gaze, but just to say that from my perspective it’s mainstream. When I can be in a taxicab in San Francisco and ask the driver if he knows about blogs, and get a knowing nod…
Yes, blogs are mainstream.
And mainstream communications mediums don’t die out. They stagnate, or they evolve or they get replaced by something that does the same thing only better. Because the reality is that once people learn to connect in a new and meaningful way they are loathe to let go of it.
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