Friday 6 February 2009

What does all this blogging mean?

Alistair Campbell has started blogging. Good move.

I do wonder though - as more and more people start blogging, will it destroy the sense of a blogging community, as it gets more and more fragmented between lots and lots of sites? Will people hop around more from one site to another, and become ever more promiscuous with their affection, or will it be like newspapers and magazines - they stick to their regulars and only occasionally take a peek at something else? And will it eventually get to the point where newspapers comment columns are redundant because whatever they want to say, it's already been said before and said better somewhere in the blogosphere? How do people see things developing over the next year, or five years?

4 comments:

Leg-iron said...

There isn't a blogging community as such. There are communities within blogging.

At the top of most blogs on blogger, there's a link to 'next blog'. That turns up some wild and wonderful places and a few you might want to clean your cache after viewing (seriously...yeuk).

The communities build from linked interests and comments on each others' blogs, links etc.
So trainspotters will build a network, bird-watchers a different network, and so on. They'd rarely read blogs outside their networks.

Newspapers are more general sources of information, of no more dubious quality than blogs in most cases. They might get information from blogs but they have the advantage that no matter how big a blog's readership (I have no stats on mine, don't care because it's costing me nothing) the papers reach a general readership. Blogs don't.

You're a political blog. So am I, but not of any party. So I read yours because of that political link.

A friend of mine runs a writer's blog. Another runs a more scientific blog. Our paths do not cross in the blog world because we are in different ghettos within it.

I don't think that will change much. Darth Campbell's move into blogging will be noticed by the political group of bloggers but not by the trainspotters, the bird-watchers, the UFO and ghost hunters or the writers or the scientists. Or the weirdoes (of which there are a disturbing number).

Over the years, I don't see that changing much. Some of the groups will get bigger, some, like photographers, will get smaller, but overall it'll be groups within the blogosphere rather than the whole thing that will vary and change.

Have a look outside the political sphere (but don't eat while you're doing it because I've come across some deviancies I didn't think were biologically possible).

The blogosphere is where real multiculturalism lies. It works here. It doesn't work in the 'live' world but it does work here.

Apologies for length. As my Scottish neighbours would say, I'm a blether.

Old Holborn said...

"I do wonder though - as more and more people start blogging, will it destroy the sense of a blogging community, as it gets more and more fragmented between lots and lots of sites?"

Yup, there it is. The New Labour mindset.

We're all the same. Chant louder. We're all the same. Excellent Comrades.

Now translate all your blogs into 14 languages, so that they are "inclusive".

Blogging will do whatever it wants to do. Maybe that frightens you a lot. It has Derek Draper quivering in a corner sucking his own thumb.

The Bristol Blogger said...

What worries me is that once the internet has destroyed newspapers who's gonna tell us it's snowing?

Kerry said...

Twitter #uksnow