Reality Check

3 March 2006

An amusing conundrum I’ve noticed:

The people we’d most like to have blog – the interesting, the famous, the intelligent – don’t have a blog; they have better things to do with their time.

While blogging has made a significant impact on the world, when you boil down to it it’s never going to be too earth shattering. Yes, traditional media will be forever changed (but when have they really stayed the same?). Yes, it allows personal free speech an accessibility that we’ve never seen before (but does anybody really care?).

But really, does anybody care what people write on their blogs?

Obviously some people do (you’re likely one of them as you’re reading this), but out the population as a whole the amount of people who read blogs on a daily basis is an insignificant fraction.

Blogs are just a type of website; not a replacement for most websites and really not much different from the mid-late nineties “homepages”. When the hype moves on, and the dust settles down (which it’s already starting to do), firstly we’ll end up with a lot less blogs, and secondly we probably won’t be able see any real difference from before.

I read a lot of sites on a daily basis – I have 391 feeds in my feed reader – and only a tiny fraction are “real” blogs (things like engadget really aren’t a blog, they’re just a news site) that are really worth reading. I wouldn’t really mind if most of them simply disappeared – the noise level would drop quite nicely.

Just a quick reality check…

From: Articles

3 March 2006