Article Forecasts Death of Personal Blogs in Two or Three Years

Posted on January 18, 2006

An article by Alex Krupp on Sys-Con.com forecasts the end of personal blogs in just two or three years. Here are a couple of the reasons Krupp gives for personal blogs going away.

The value of blogging comes mainly from two things: one, the feedback you get from others, and two, the ability to spread your ideas. In order to get enough people reading a personal blog to generate an interesting conversation I'd have to share something insightful every day for months or even years. And even then it's unlikely that I'd ever get more than twenty or so comments on average. However, I can go on a collaborative blog like Kuro5hin or Dailykos and write a diary about any random idea and get over 100 comments the first time if my ideas are any good. I'm not gonna lie, I usually don't even think of one insightful thing a day for myself, so trying to share something daily with others in order to gain a following is a non-starter for me and most other people. If I wanted feedback from just my friends and family I'd just ask them, and if I wanted feedback from lots of random people I'd just post somewhere where lots of random people will be reading. Personal blogs are a poor solution to both.

The problem with this point is in surveys many people have indicated that they blog because they think it is fun or because they find blogging therapeutic -- not because they want to start or continue a conversation or because they want to become famous. The author is also forgetting that some bloggers have developed little niches or communities that act as support groups. And others have made friends online and they may only get a small about of feedback but this feedback is really important to the particular blogger. These niches may be incredibly boring to an outsider but very interesting to the small group of bloggers. Not everyone is going to give up just because they don't get 8,000+ MySpace friends or 100+ inbound links on Technorati.

Lastly, most people don't have anything interesting to say most of the time. Eventually people will figure out that the world doesn't revolve around them and no one gives a shit about what Johnny said about Suzie at the pool last weekend. Certainly there is a place for this type of stuff, but because people feel obligated to post every day there is a lot of unnecessary signal pollution.

People think they have something interesting to say. To a certain extent it doesn't matter how little feedback there is. As long as the person gets a benefit out of writing the personal blog they will continue to do it.

The author did try and save himself somewhat by adding this footnote: "Not dead in the sense that they won't actually exist, but in the sense that they won't have nearly as much influence as they have today."