Elyzabethe at Yellow is the Color is calling it quits. This seems to be a trend among bloggers.

Is this part of the adoption cycle? The early adopters were probably around 2004 or earlier. Then blogging hit mainstream and everyone had one. Is the fad of blogging winding down? I would have assumed that the trend of blogging was over. The only blogs around should be angst-filled teenagers, tech nerds, stay-at-home moms, people with too much free time at work and the small group of talented writers who need to be blogging.

A while back, Raee, also at Yellow is the Color, stopped posting. She told me that she was tired of the chatter. She couldn’t add anything to the discussion, and most bloggers were yelling at each other. She’s not the only one among my blogging friends or daily reads either going private or quitting the Internets completely.

Raee has a point. Blogging is amazing because it potentially gives every blogger an equal voice. While the democratization of our communications and political systems is a good thing, it also creates a lot of noise and conflict. Democracy is never a neat or polite process.

Elyzabethe also notes:

See, once upon a time, operating under the I-am-blogging-solely-for-my-own-amusement assumption, I thought it was fine to have a blog where I wrote about feminist stuff, and libertarian stuff, and Ohio, and framing, and facebook, and copyright, and whatever the hell else I felt like writing about. But I don’t think this works, building-a-blog-wise. There are tech bloggers. There are feminist bloggers. There are PR bloggers. Everyone operates in their own little circles of the blogosphere, and seldom the twain shall meet, if you will. So I began to feel like it was a little silly to try and build a blog writing about whatever the hell I wanted to. It doesn’t really help you break in to any particular community.

In the beginning that was blogging. Most blogs were very general and vaguely defined. As the blogosphere has organized, topical blogs have started to dominate. This sucks for people with lots of interests. You either pick one thing and devote yourself to the issue, or you can maintain several blogs. I’ve tried both and dislike both. Unless you’re blogging professionally or advocating a specific issue, I believe that blogs should be a reflection of our personalities. That’s a catch-22. The few readers I draw because of my thoughts on communication are probably bored with silly dog stories or endless odes to Chattanooga. Chattanoogans, loving all things that relate back to our fair city, are probably bored with wannabe academic discussions of communication models. Then there are the liberals who stop by to see what things this crazy conservative is writing.

Elyzabethe also continues:

the whole blog world seems so pointlessly circular sometimes. Some event happens, or some major news outlet publishes something, or some court case is decided, and then the big bloggers write about it and analyze it or snark-i-tize it, and then all the smaller bloggers link to those other bloggers and add their own analysis or snark or whatever … and it all just feeds off each other, around and around, and seems quite silly when you think about it, doesn’t it? And sometimes you’re on top of your game and write about something days before everyone else does, but it doesn’t matter, because nobody reads you anyway; and sometimes you write a really long and thoughtful or particularly snarky post, and you’re kind of proud of it, but nobody reads it anyway …

Yeah, I have to agree. The blogosphere is a set of spheres for a reason. It’s dizzying to try and sort it out. Then there’s the writing because you want to write about it vs. writing to build traffic. Also, why should you even join the discussion? Unless you’re a true expert, and most likely writing a narrowly defined blog, is your opinion more important than some other person down the street? Blogging encourages armchair quarterbacking, which feeds into Raee’s problem from above.

The flip side is that a few talented people rise to the top. The 500 awful blogs that you read are worth it for that one blogger who can use the medium to succeed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 10:52 pm and is filed under social media, communications, friends, blog, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.