Link: IP Democracy.
October 2, 2007
"Where Have All the Blogs Gone?
"In the wake of Techmeme's launch of its top 100 Leaderboard sites, it's clear that blogging is, if not dead, then morphing into something quite different than what it started out to be.
"And today's announcement that the Huffington Post "blog" will hire Betsy Morgan, currently General Manager of CBSnews.com, as its new CEO makes official the end of the blogging era.
"Techmeme, widely understood to be a "blog" aggregator, counts very few true "blogs" in its ranking, as Scott Karp points out. Not only does the list include many old media mainstays such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, along with top trade publications such as Computerworld, but it is also heavily tilted toward new media "brands" formerly known as blogs such as GigaOm, TechCrunch and Engadget.
"What really struck me about the Techmeme leaderboard (beyond, of course, Publishing 2.0 debuting at #58) is how it is dominated by media brands. And when I say media brands, I mean TechCrunch, GigaOm, Search Engine Land, Engadget and Gizmodo. There are very few “blogs” on in the “traditional” sense, i.e. a SINGLE voice, like Dave Winer or Jeff Jarvis. There are many media brands that use blogging software, that have comments and trackbacks, that encourage their writers to have a distinctive voice — these media brands certainly retain their blog roots.
"I would add that yet another blog that is not a blog is Rafat Ali's paidcontent.org. All of these sites – TechCrunch, GigaOm, Engadget, and paidcontent.org, plus many others – are big deal media concerns, albeit still in their earliest stages of development, backed by venture capital and staffed by professional writers, editors, graphic designers and sales people. Nothing about them says "blogs," if by blog you mean a true web log that reflects an individual's take on a particular topic, or just life in general....
(((At least "aggregator" sounds punchier than "lifefeed.")))
