It’s a little weird writing a blog article about how blogs may have peaked in their popularity. Anyway…
I get that you may not get this reference if you’re under the age of around 30, but for everyone else: do you remember Filofaxes? While “Filofax” the company are still in business, I have to say that I haven’t met anyone who uses a Filofax in at least the last decade.
Essentially not much more than an expensive mini lever arch file, these once must-have personal accessories of the 1980s were, for most people, a combination of address book, diary, calendar and notebook. I suppose in some ways the Filofax has been replaced by the Moleskine, especially if you have a man-bun and beard, or wear Uggs while walking around town with a Starbucks cup of something far too sweet.
Then, as with most things analogue-based Filofaxes all but slipped into oblivion, replaced for most people with digital-based equivalents. First it was the Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA, in the form of Palm Pilots and the like.
Today, most people that I know keep all their stuff together on their phone. The “PDA” as we used to know it has embedded itself in common culture by infusing itself into the common denominator of personal items, the cellphone.
So, are blogs set to go the same way as Filofaxes or PDAs?
Is Blogging Dead?
Blogging, once revolutionary and even subversive, billed as a disruptive technology to traditional media, has entered the mainstream. Around the world, two new blogs are created every second of every day. However, I don’t need to tell you that the vast majority of blogs out there exist only because they can. Blogging has been made so easy that everyone’s doing it, including people who clearly shouldn’t be…
Blogging is also fragmenting in terms of its form. The FaceBook / MySpace generation increasingly simply update their social network page rather than create a blog. Other technologies are competing for attention, such as a Twitter, which could be described as a sort of real-time micro-blog.
But the bigger indicator, in my view, that the writing’s on the wall for blogs is that many of the biggest-read blogs out there today are created by media organisations. You’d be hard-pressed to find a newspaper, radio or TV channel today that doesn’t run a blog – and update it faster than any individual blogger ever could.
No-one can argue that the form and function of a blog has merit. However, the way that blogs are distributed to their audience is diversifying. Does that mean blogging is dead? I don’t think so. But it does mean the quality of blog articles will need to increase, in the light of increased competition for reader attention.