Death of the Blog

Here’s a post at the “Raw Fisher” blog from “The Washington Post” announcing the death of the blog trend.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/

It is certainly a welcome development and a proper correction. Blogs may be to 2005 what Rubic’s Cube was to, well, whenever Rubic’s cube came out.

And that little bit there is blogging, you see. The lazy application of irony or cheap humor where a few minutes of research into the cube would have been required at a proper news organization.

The beast moves so fast today. Everybody got a blog. It became overwhelming. Everybody was a critic and all you read about in magazines was blogs, blogs, blogs.

But that story became old. Teen movies are already mocking blogs. You cannot democratize the world of talent. And after a year, even some of the talented are leaving the Kingdom of Blog along with the droves of bandwagonners moved on to the next cool thing.

The door’s over there.

The few, the proud, the true remain. Some people have to write and communicate, while some people have to tell other people about how they write and communicate, and it’s the latter bunch that is now bailing.

the scribe has long thought the Internet and all its spawn are media-ready phenomena that titillate the pallets of blue state-minds and quirky people drawn to screens, and he still thinks so. It’s big because reporters think it is so, but not so big as they think.

As an information and research tool, the Internet knows no rival, but as a gatherer of quality news, it has in the end served to buck-up the image of the old-school, “expensive” reporting offered by traditional news organizations.

At least that’s what the guy at “Raw Fisher” calls them – “expensive.”

All that said, blogs do give voice.

To focus on a “Top 100” or to bean-count a blog’s sales revenue is to miss the point completely.

For the time being, the management and generation of a blog offers the same thrilling experience of interconnectedness the Net promised back in the day when everybody was jumping on it, without any idea of what to do.

Well this is what you do, and the thrill is far from gone.

You run a blog, you will hear from people you never imagined and wonder always how it happened. To a certain degree, the blogger handpicks and crafts an audience by whom they contact, by whom they link to, and thanks to the variety and breadth of information they themselves generate.

The Web log is an unalloyed benefit to those who write for it gives space to voices silenced by market and literary trends of the moment, and helps them find the smaller groups of readers who see their divergence as advance, rather than flaw.

A few readers is good, too. Very good and much better than nothing.

There will be a falling away, but the blog duped the media into a coverage blitz that gave it a foothold in American pop culture, and the blog delivered both excitement and substance, carving out a niche in the battle for our so-divided attentions.