The “Is Blogging Dead” Meme and Other Navel-Gazing Nonsense
It seems like it’s becoming an annual tradition for a blogger or reporter on a slow news day to observe that a trend of “a-lister” bloggers are retiring from the blogging scene and one of the informal golden rules in reporting is:
- If it happens once, it’s an accident.
- If it happens twice, it’s a coincidence.
- If it happens three times, you have a “trend” story on your hands.
So 3 prominent bloggers quitting the scene within a period of 1-2 years = trend?
The one thing about the “golden rule” was that it generally applied to the brick-and-mortar context, not as much when you’re talking about 3 or more bloggers out of the hundreds of millions of blogs out there.
Statistically, even 100 top bloggers out of a universe of 100 million blogs would be 1 / 1,000,000. In decimal points that would be 0.000001% of the blogging population.
So wondering if “blogging is dead” is akin to wondering if fixed-line telephones are dead or if the fax machine is dead. Nice linkbait, but I don’t think there’s much substance or value to that argument.
Jason Lee Miller notes in his WebProNews piece that fame (or the price of it) might be the cause of (more…)