Joining the Bandwagon

It is often with reluctance that we throw in our bid and jump on the bandwagon. If you were not one of the pioneers, you may have sat back and hoped that the new fangled fad would die out. When it did not and went from strength to strength, you could only look on and wish you had joined sooner. Eventually, there may have come a time when you could no longer ignore the importance of the “fad”, and with a grimace, that is when you climb aboard.

Demise of blogging

Blogging is now so well established, that joining the “blogosphere” is getting onto a very well-travelled path. There are an incredible diversity of blogs covering innumerable topics, written by an equally diverse group of people. Is there room for more bloggers? News of the demise of the blog has already begun: in September of this year, Andrew Parker wrote about Twitter taking over his blog; Bruce Sterling sees a similar phenomenon with a greater array of platforms to carry a message, such as Facebook and RSS; and as early as 2006 the BBC reported that media research firm, Gartner is predicting that 2007 will show the peak of blogging.

Evolve to survive

Being a harbinger of doom has always been a productive niche - people have been predicting the imminent end of the world for centuries, but that has yet to happen. Although the market for blogs is probably saturated now, and many blogs will come and go, there are many blogs that are producing useful content, which is indexed by search engines and maintain a loyal readership. Undoubtedly, as a technologically-based platform though, blogs will have to evolve to survive. There is no such thing as static technology, and you can see that blogs are beginning to embrace the new trends that are becoming popular on the Internet, such as video-blogs (vlogs).

It could be that content that is currently posted on blogs shifts over to social networking sites such as Facebook, but doing this will lose one of the greatest strengths of the blog format: its openness. Most Facebook pages are restricted to your own networks, and the content is not indexed by search engines. As a result, new users cannot stumble upon your content serendipitously, or through searching.

Fiona Campbell Howes has written a thoughtful article suggesting that attention spans continue to decline, and the blog has suffered. Whereas sites such as Twitter offer tiny bites of immediate contents, blogs are slower moving, and so cannot compete in terms of timescale. This suggests that blogs are better suited to longer, less frequent and more thoughtful content. Perhaps this will lead to a rise in the quality of blogs, as part of their evolution.

Time will tell

This blog will attempt to follow and lead the evolution to the next stage of blogging. In the meantime, if you have not already started a blog, you are already late, but hop on now, the bandwagon may not be running that much longer!

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