John Lampard over at disassociated has a post about the renaissance of
blogging in general and wonders if niche blogs are next. I was a bit surprised by that because I wasn’t aware that blogs went anywhere.
Perhaps I’ve got a narrow view of things but I’m not aware of there being significantly less blogs than there ever were and almost all of them are what could be called niche blogs in the sense that they mostly deal with a single subject. There are, to be sure, some general newsy blogs—Instapundit comes to mind—but most seem to be focused on a particular subject or at least a narrow range of related subjects.
Certainly Irreal is like that. Most of its posts are about Emacs, followed by those of some other technical subject, and finally a few rants about my favorite hobby horses. Similarly, I have a lot of blogs in my feed that are like that. Their niches are varied: some are about Emacs, some are about Unix, some about computing in general, some are about writing, and some are about a diverse set of things that interest me.
The type of blog that was literally an online diary—today I had a Reuben for lunch—are happily extinct but it seems to me that you can find examples of most other types. What do you guys think? Does it seem to you that blogs have died out and that niche blog especially are a dying art? I don’t think so but as I said, I may have a narrow view of things based on my working on Irreal everyday.