Posted on 09/25/2007 1:27:10 PM PDT by XR7
...Andy Warhol's famous aphorism was modified to read, "In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people." Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.
Tech researcher Gartner Inc. reported...200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active.
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Gartner...told reporters. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." ...Gartner says blogging has probably peaked.
Which isn't to say that blogging is dead...Blog aggregator Technorati estimates that 3 million new blogs are launched every month...
...What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering...is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency...
[C]onservative political blogger Glenn Reynolds told Wired News..."I know that if I go more than about five or six hours without posting...[I'll get worried messages asking,] 'You haven't posted anything in five or six hours. Are you okay?'"
"Good bloggers work like dogs," says Michael Parsons, editor of the tech site CNet.co.uk. "You can't expect readers to show up unless you show up. And the Internet never closes. … Every successful blogger I've come across is the same. Eat, sleep, and drink the work. No time out; no holidays."
That's not a recipe for healthy living, especially if you're working a day job that's not paying you to blog...
But some of us can't help ourselves. Nearly as common as the abandoned blog is the "final comments before I reclaim my life" post. Followed by "an update to something I said in my final comments." And, "Well, I couldn't let this story go by." And on it goes...
(Excerpt) Read more at christianitytoday.com ...
Hey JimRob: Are you okay?
But some of us can't help ourselves. Nearly as common as the abandoned blog is the "final comments before I reclaim my life" post. Followed by "an update to something I said in my final comments." And, "Well, I couldn't let this story go by."
Sounds like FR!
Closer to the truth is that everyone thinks everybody else cares what they have to say until they realize that nobody really cares. Last year I checked on the blogs that a couple of my more self-obsessed professional acquaintances were writing. Exactly zero people had written comments on their (many) blog entries.
Rush Limbaugh showed us how to mashup a montage of the liberal-speak, mind-numbed moments where everyone on all the approved media was speaking from the same paragraph on the same Leftist talking points. We now have YouTube and other outlets to post and store, to archive and recall these moments, which we will use to freshen everyone’s memories of exactly what fools and loons, and most of all, how dangerous the moonbats really are.
The internet age is the left’s worse nightmare with respect to their stranglehold of news and opinion. We are free to have our own opinions now based on all the facts, not just the facts that fit the approved, leftist, template.
;)
No doubt this forum is much more appaealing and interesting than blogs...
I can read a lot of people’s thoughts and opinions here...instead of just one.
I once had a blog, but got bored with it quickly
A blog, in most cases, is like talking to yourself...only on-line
Blogs seem so self-centered......FR is better....you have to interact...well....sort of....AND, you can write or not, or just read.....here you see multitudes of opinions and thoughts on mostly what is going on in the world around us. A Blog is just one person’s view, unless of course anyone cares to comment. I could care less about what some little snoots blog says.
I swear, if I ever run into a reporter who knows how to read a statistical study and then write about it honestly and accurately, I will kiss him on both cheeks and ask him to run off to Tehran together. Not really, but I am making a point here.
Congressman Billybob
Instead, they've become "Web 2.0", which is really Web 0.1; i.e., glorified BBSes of the days of yore. Nothing new here.
Speaking of nothing new, only the word "blog" and the software currently in use are relatively new. People have been blogging for years, as far as posting daily or weekly news and/or opinion updates.
In fact, Steve Jackson Games, for example, has had a daily update posted every day for the past 16 years (1993) when they established themselves on the Web. Before that, they had daily updates on their BBS.
Thank goodness you added that. Started to worry for a second!
I agree. I find FR quite informative, addictive, and up-to-date. Of course I don’t agree with everything I read here, but who wants that?
God Bless bloggers who have the strength to do this every day, and the wisdom to make what they write worth reading.
It’s the water cooler, the soapbox, the town square, the checkers game at the barber shop, the bulletin board, the reference desk.
The view from Boston, Baghdad, Beijing, Biloxi, Brooklyn.
[Come in, Beijing!]
Write on!
Blogging took off before You-Tube. Why read through a bunch of crap, when you can watch it all for free...
Pied Piper Pitt, are you Okay?
Which isn't so bad if you're main reason for doing it is so that you can remember what you said.
I've contemplated starting my own blog, but not so it will grab millions of eyeballs so I can load it with ads, make money and retire to the Bahamas. If I decide to do it, I'll do it just because I want to have someplace to 'park' my thoughts; someplace that's searchable, that I can access from just about anywhere, and that I don't have to carry around with me.
Another thing is this: In the conservative world I’ve read blogs ad nauseum about why liberalism is bad. Okay guys, we get it. Do you have any solutions?
The difference with Free Republic is the sense of community. We KNOW each other, pray for each other
and worry over each other, and harrass each other -
just like family. Free Republic is a “genuine” place, where everybody knows your ... er ... name.
I actually think that the web might help to ameliorate the problem. Why? Because IMHO media concentration is the cause of the problem. And the media concentration has been intense. We started out with a diffuse country with a diffuse journalism process. The result was that all the newspapers resembled the little freebie local weekly newspapers of today. People didn't look to the newspapers for international news, because the printer didn't have any faster access to news from distant places than the barber shop or saloon did.What is the difference between those freebie newspapers of today and the mass media newspapers of today? One thing is the sheer scale of the printing operations - and the other is the Associated Press. The telegraph and the Associated Press constituted a homogenizing force on journalism. The telegraph was initially considered pretty much equivalent to magic. And the AP produced nationwide distribution of national news. That was amazing, kind of magical - and it had the obvious effect of giving a single corporation access to the eyeballs of the entire country. So naturally, that was challenged. And the response to that challenge was the same back then as we are familiar with today - "The Associated Press is objective."
That claim of objectivity was sine qua non for the people to accept the Associated Press and its monopoly control of national news. And it also was as unfounded back then as it is today. The AP was founded in 1848, and in the 1860s the Lincoln Administration used the AP to censor the news. AP went along with the limitation of what it could report, and Lincoln saw to it that the AP didn't have effective competition. So ironically, the AP originally was a cat's paw for the Republican Party.
Anyway, the Internet means that nobody has to wait for the Associated Press to give them the word; you can get the info from a Web site or a blog posting from wherever the news originates, and it gets picked up by a bigger blog and/or by FR, and by talk radio. And the AP is no longer as effective as a gatekeeper. We still have things like the Duke "rape" case and Rather October Surprise known as the Texas ANG "memos" to illustrate that Big Journalism still thinks of itself as a gatekeeper keeping us from coalescing around the truth. But the results of those cases are encouraging that we will finally transcend the AP.
And if we transcend the AP, we will transcend the conceit that journalists acting in the interests of journalism are acting in the public interest. That is a fatuous conceit, and it produces the phenomenon condemned by Theodore Roosevelt in his "Man it the Arena" speech. Like journalism, "liberalism" is self-promotion via criticism of the people who get things done. Delegitimate that, and you collapse the socialist (actually "governmentist") movement.
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