WSJ Article Defends Blogs From Recent Blog Doom Articles
An article in the WSJ Online by Jason Fry defends blogs from the recent blogging doom articles in Slate, The Chicago Tribune, the Financial Times and many others (see Blog Pessimism). One columnist even said blogs are a bigger waste of time than Minesweeper. Fry, who shares a baseball blog with his friend Greg Prince, says blogging will stay but he is not a blog evangelist. Fry dismisses the idea that there is a massive blog revolution going on.
Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.
However, he does see blogging as a lasting publishing tool.
Blogs will be everywhere in the near-future, but singling them out amid the Internet tumult will seem odd, like talking about one's favorite commerce or community sites as a group. Media companies will use blogs to track fast-moving stories and bring some much-needed attitude and voice to their brands. Corporations will use them for updates and conversations with their own employees or customers. A handful of blog empires such as Gawker Media will create new ones regularly, building brands around the hits and shuttering the misses. And yes, lots of people will build their own blogs to issue family updates, share political views or offer their own thoughts on life. (Some of them will even attract loyal readers, more exposure and make a little money.) And I hope Greg and I will still be demonstrating we're the planet's most-insane Mets fans.
Blogs are approaching the everywhere point. There were lots of media outlets that launched event blogs for CES, Sundance and the Olympics. Even the AP took a shot at a blog for the Olympics. There are some that see blogs as much more than a publishing tool -- such as the upcoming Edgeio company (more here) that will be focusing on blog classifieds. It will be interesting to watch these kinds of developments over the next six to twelve months.
