*Death of blogging notions like this one getting quite mainstream these days, so I'm looking forward to some death of social media pitches. I rather doubt that I'll have to wait long.
*I might have to tweet or video-ize the death of social media instead of "blogging" it.
http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/end-blogging
(...)
"Whatever blogs have become, there seems to be universal agreement that the format that made them ubiquitous—the reverse-chronological aggregation accompanied by commentary—is not long for this world, (((apparently this guy's never seen a paper diary))) and Mr. Denton's scoop-friendly redesign would seem to be the best evidence of that. In fact, the decline of the blog has come so quickly, one has to wonder whether we ever really liked the medium at all.
"From the beginning, I didn't call the sites 'blogs,'" said Dan Abrams, who launched his Mediaite network in 2009. "And that's true because I always had this vision of them being more than just advertising-supported, ah, well, blogs. You know, whatever the word is."
"What is blogging?" asked Lockhart Steele, publisher of the Curbed network. "Is what Capital New York is doing, do you consider that blogging? Well, yes and no."
"It always has been an embarrassing word," The Awl's Choire Sicha said. "First it was embarrassing because bloggers were these dirty, horrible people, and then it was embarrassing because our grandmas have blogs, God bless them." (((I bet the grandchildren of The Awl's Choire Sicha are gonna have quite a few embarrassment problems as well.)))
"The reluctance to even talk about blogs may have sprung from the fact that our early enthusiasm for the medium was, in the clarity of hindsight, based entirely on hypotheticals. Blogs were meant to offer untrammeled personal expression. They could turn elections. They'd straight-up murder newspapers! Oh gosh, remember The Printed Blog?
"We even thought that owning enough of them could turn a tidy profit. In 2003, Google both debuted AdSense and purchased the Blogspot blogging platform, symptoms of the business model based on the notion that ads could target a vast audience of niche readers. In 2004, Jason Calacanis launched a blog dedicated solely to the goings on of satellite radio. "Howard is moving to satellite radio, so it's a done deal," he wrote, excitedly, in the launch's press release,
"We were certainly much more casual about launching sites," Mr. Denton said of those days. "As soon as we had a name and a concept, we just launched."
"Somewhere between the business and personal sides of the blogging bubble were of course the bloggers themselves, sometimes pajamaed, often scoop-wielding and truly witty creatures that occasionally danced across the cover of your New York Times Magazine. If bloggers back then were no less reviled, they were at least objects of curiosity.
"When the micropublishing model flopped, the game soon turned to going bigger—in this period, Gawker reversed its ban on reality stars, among other measures, to grab more readers—competing for the largest audience in the areas, like gossip and media, known to be successes. Sites like Business Insider and Mediaite popped on the scene to compete for those ever-inflating ad dollars, and this called for more bloggers.
(((I'm guessing this person never met any of the programmers who invented the blog platform.)))
"Soon every 22-year-old with a "Sarah Palin" Google alert and a dose of irony fancied himself the next Alex Balk. From the story selection to the sarcastic or hyperbolic headlines, blog content became predictable, and duller for it. It's the sort of thing that can lead a good blogger to feel undervalued.
"In his November farewell post, after a five-year stint on the Atlantic blog, Marc Ambinder wrote that it will be a relief to head to the National Journal, where he will feel no compulsion to turn every piece into the opinion of "a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."
"You're competitive in terms of getting something first, and then you're competitive on getting a take that is close to the truth so much as it can be approximated, and then you're competitive in building and keeping an influential and broad-based readership," Mr. Ambinder told The Observer, speaking with exhaustion of his time on the Web.
"With the Jason Kottkes and Andrew Sullivans already established and still working, he added, it's become increasingly difficult to carve out a niche.
"We're at a stage now where that market is saturated, so it's the long tail phenomenon. We're getting to the point where it's really, really hard once you start, unless you're a phenomenon or something," he said.
"This saturation of opinion dripped into the personal blogging sphere as well, with Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter becoming the preferred mode for oversharing, the sharing sort of being the point, and aggregation.
"To establish the very basics, the personal blog took the form of a passive Web site that offered a glimpse into one's inner life to anyone interested, whereas these networks broadcast these thoughts to friends, who would presumably be best suited to receive them, and who in turn used these networks over the others, without having to trudge through, say, Wordpress.
"The purpose of it is just pretty different," said the Web developer Rex Sorgatz, who recently gave up his personal blog for a Tumblr.... "
