Maybe you've heard: Blogs are a vanishing fad -- this year's digital Pet Rock. Or a business bubble about to pop. Or a sucker's bet for new-media fame seekers.
Recent weeks have seen the rise of a cottage industry in Whither Blogging? articles. New York magazine cast cold water on newly minted bloggers' dreams with an examination of the divide between a handful of A-list blogs and countless B-list and C-list blogs that can't get much traffic no matter how hard their creators work. Slate's Daniel Gross spotlighted signs that blogs may have peaked as a business. And a much-discussed poll from Gallup concluded that growth in U.S. blog readers was "somewhere between nil and negative." From there it was off to the races, with all manner of commentators weighing in, led by the Chicago Tribune, which smirked its way through an anti-blogging editorial that got Mr. Gross's name wrong while taking odd potshots at Al Gore and snowboarding.
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.
My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely -- and sometimes inaccurately -- to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening: One of the chief problems with some chronicles of blogging's demise is their confusion about definitions, a confusion that's mirrored in efforts to measure blogs' popularity or to say anything that can apply to bloggers as a group.
Take Gallup's poll. Beyond flat to declining blog traffic, it found just 9% of Internet users read blogs frequently, 11% do so occasionally, 13% rarely bother, and 66% never do. And "reading blogs" ranked last in a list of 13 common Internet activities, below things like emailing, checking news and weather, and shopping.
But that's no surprise: Even A-list bloggers email and check news more than they read other blogs. Moreover, reading blogs and checking news aren't necessarily different things. Blog posts show up in search-engine results, get emailed and IM'ed around, and wind up in Google News and news aggregators. Internet veterans may spy the factory-standard Blogger header or see Comments, Permalinks and Trackbacks and know they've landed on a blog, but this isn't obvious to everybody -- including, one imagines, Internet users being polled. (Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport calls that point "well-taken," and observes that even those who don't read blogs get exposed to them through the mainstream media. But that said, Mr. Newport notes that the lackluster traffic data "still hold," as does the fact that a significant number of respondents said they never read blogs. "I think that does tell us something," he says.)
If blogs are hard to pin down, so are bloggers. A common caricature beloved by editorialists is the pajama-clad navel-gazer who deems the minutiae of his or her life worthy of a world-wide audience -- and there are such bloggers. (Some of them are quite entertaining, too.) But there are other caricatures: the snarky soapbox blogger trying to parlay attitude into life as an author or talking head (and earn some money via text ads), or the political ranter digging up obscure dirt. When even the caricatures don't mesh, that's a warning sign about generalizations. The Chicago Tribune might have done well to check in with its very own stable of bloggers -- one of whom, Eric Zorn, swiftly dismantled his own colleagues' editorial the next day. Bloggers within the big-media tent should count as a breed in their own right, as should bloggers who strive to become the authoritative source on Niche X, corporate blogs with a rotating cast of authors, and all the other flavors of blogs and bloggers developing out there by fits and starts. That's a lot of camps, all with different goals, styles and strategies.
Blog measurement is another mess. The latest word from Dave Sifry, CEO of the blog search engine Technorati, is that there are some 28.4 million blogs and the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5.5 months. Eye-popping figures like that have been thrown around a lot recently, but folks making revolutionary claims about blogging won't like other Technorati numbers: Less than half of those blogs are still getting posts three months after their creation, and less than 10% -- just 2.7 million -- are updated at least weekly. That means of Technorati's blogs, more than 90% are either abandoned or updated too rarely to merit the name -- nothing kills reader interest or visits more quickly and thoroughly than a stale blog.
Still, 2.7 million active blogs is impressive. But how should we measure their audience? Technorati does so by looking at incoming links, which is the closest thing the blog world has to an industry standard, but doesn't tell the whole story -- not with search engines and news aggregators shooting blog posts out into the general fray of the Net.
I've learned this first hand: When my friend Greg Prince and I started our baseball blog, Fear and Faith in Flushing, our moods used to soar and crash based on the "referrer summary" of sites that had linked to us. After a while, we noticed something odd: Our traffic kept increasing, even as our referrers held steady or decreased. Then we realized this was a good thing: Readers were coming directly to us instead of through intermediaries. Being part of a blog community is valuable, but it isn't everything. (If you're so inclined, read more about my blogging misadventures in this Real Time from October.)
The possibility that blogs have peaked as a business, meanwhile, has sometimes been misinterpreted as a death knell for blogging itself -- a claim, it should be noted, that I don't find in the Slate column. Big blog acquisitions were always destined to be a passing thing as big media companies tried to catch up -- soon the media empires will all have their own blogs, and deals like Time Warner's $25 million acquisition of Weblogs Inc. will be emblematic of a brief, bygone time. But the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money won't mean the end of blogs -- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits.
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.
But blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they'll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation. That may feel a long way from the claims of blogging's first heady days, but then that's the way most such things turn out: Wikis aside, today's Web looks very little like Tim Berners-Lee's original idea for a kind of digital whiteboard. Blogging is easier, faster and more conversational than traditional Web publishing, but that doesn't change the fact that relatively few people actually yearn to be publishers. Nor do they particularly care what category the things they read fit into, or what technological tools produced them. That may not sound like the stuff of revolution or VC riches, but it also doesn't sound like a fad or a failure.
Any thoughts on how blogs and the business of blogs will change? How have blogs changed your online habits? Drop me a line at realtime@wsj.com -- comments will be posted periodically in Real Time. If you don't want your comments considered for Real Time, please make that clear.
