As a nice contraposition to yesterday’s post on how the blogosphere is the only remaining vibrant part of that segment of the Internet dedicated to what could loosely be called “social media”, Venkatesh Rao opines that the blogosphere is dying.
After 17 years, he is retiring his blog, ribbonfarm.com saying that the main reason is his belief that the blogosphere is dead. Unlike Winer, who believes that blogs are the only worthwhile part of the social media scene remaining, Rao thinks that the age of the blog is over and is being replaced by things like Substack.
I’m with Winer on this. Of course, I am: I’m a blogger. Still, it’s hard to see how blogs are dead or even dying. To be sure, the original concept of moments from my life—today I had a tunafish sandwich for lunch—has long been replaced by blogs concentrating on commentary of some sort. The two main types are technical and political but there are many others. Whatever subject you’re interested in, there’s sure to be blogs covering it.
As for Substack and the like, they seem to me to be blogs by another name. A lot of the writers on Substack are journalists who either ran screaming from Twitter when Musk opened the doors to the Hoi Polloi or who were trying to escape from the dying traditional media. As journalists, they would, of course, rather die than admit to something as déclassé as blogging. Even though the average Substack post is longer than the average blog post, they are immediately recognizable as blog posts.
My conclusion is that blogging is not dying and is in fact emerging triumphant over the noise from the rest of social media.