Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The End of Blogs?


Andrew Sullivan is killing his blog.  Dylan Byers comments on that and tells us this:

Sullivan was able to keep blogging alive (and lucrative) long after the era of blogs had come to an end -- at The Atlantic, at The Daily Beast, and, in recent years, through the funding of readers. It's also true that Sullivan's influence has waned of late. While there is still some demand for Sullivan's outspokenness -- he's at his best when he's arguing, aggressively -- there is far less demand for unspecialized aggregation.
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Sullivan deserves immense credit for keeping his project alive, but its days were numbered.
So the blogs are waning.  What is waxing?  According to some, it's the Twitter.  But that's a distribution channel, not the content producer. 

The economic jargon in all that fascinates me.  We look at the demand side of the market:  What do people want?  They no longer want some smartass opining on everything and anything between heaven and earth.  They want, according to Byers, specialization and original content.

But what IS that demand for?  Writing?  Information?  Commenting?  Hanging out with friends and enemies?

Then there's the idea of "content."  To someone like me who adores and venerates that stuff called content the term sounds as if birthday presents exist only to justify an industry in wrappings and bows.

Still, I get the point, because people have to eat and to climb up career ladders.  But if blogs are dying (and as a general category they probably are), what is taking their place online?