One of my very first posts back in 2002 looked at whether blogging was a fad like CB radio and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t[1]. Four years and tens of millions of blogs later, Guy Rundle at Crikey asks the same question and reaches the opposite answer (reprinted at Mark Bahnisch). The main evidence he offers is the proliferation of dead and still-born blogs. Rundle draws an analogy with 17th century pamphlets, which he presents as a transitional technology, paving the way for newspapers.
A much better analogy, and one that’s obviously in Rundle’s mind as an editor of Arena is the “little magazine”. If you go through the stacks of any good library, you’ll find huge numbers of dead magazines, with lifespans running from decades to a single optimistic issue. There are almost certainly far more dead magazines than live ones. But the little magazine form has persisted up to the present, and is now migrating to the Internet.
Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Rundle hopes and expects that the future of online publishing will belong to magazine-style publications “well-edited moderate circulation outlets [that] can charge and get subscriptions” rather than to blogs. There are a few examples, including Crikey itself, New Matilda and Gawker and Salon in the US (also Opinion Online, but that’s free). Still, there’s very little evidence that such publications are displacing blogs, and serious doubts about whether the model as a whole is viable. The biggest attempt to organise a bunch of blogs into a media empire has been, as far as anyone can see, an expensive disaster.
It would be a pity for the little magazine format to disappear, but it seems likely that some fairly radical changes are needed if it is to survive the shift to the Internet, which renders many of the traditional gatekeeping functions of editors obsolete. Rather than bagging blogs, Guy Rundle would be better off thinking about questions like this.
Update While I was thinking about this, I looked about for a bit of evidence and found this survey on people’s familiarity with Internet terms. Unfortunately blogs weren’t included, but 9 per cent of respondents claimed to have a good idea what an RSS feed is (compared to 13 per cent for podcasting, which is new, but also much more directly accessible to anyone with an iPod). Blog reading isn’t the only use for an RSS feed, but it was the first big one, and still probably the most important, and using an RSS feed is still a sign of a hardcore reader. Of course, some people may have answered incorrectly, but I was still favorably surprised by this.
fn1. Mind you, I thought, and still think SMS is like CB radio, so all opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
John Quiggin 
Yes but TV is going to kill radio stone dead any day now.
Video killed the radio star!
Good song… bad prediction.
Guy Rundle on blogs…
Yesterday, Crikey ran a short piece by Guy Rundle on blogs. I’m reproducing it with permission, and a response I’ve submitted.
Update: The response is in today’s Crikey email, in the comments, corrections, clarifications and c*ck-ups section. Unfort…
Pajama’s problem is that they haven’t managed to secure advertising revenue – Largely due to the fact one particular PJM blogger is a race-hate spewing lunatic, with a comments section that makes tim blair’s appear sedate and tolerant.
Blogs don’t need to be organised into empires, neither the author nor the readers benefit. I subscribe to all the blogs I follow via RSS, so the cost of reading many is the same as reading one (or rather is in the order of the number of articles, not the number of blogs). I don’t read the magazine style websites, and while I was a keen Slate reader, I read it much less now — because their RSS feed provides no detail on their articles, and I’m not prepared to visit their web site to discover which articles interest me.
Scot Adams in one of his books (yes I know he’s a cartoonist, but he can quite insightful) predicted the rise of some sort of medium in which people would write for free. It turned out he was right and that medium is the blog. He based that prediction on the realisation that you don’t have to pay people to write. People love to talk and write just for the sake of being heard. Sometimes not even that.
“People love to talk and write just for the sake of being heard. Sometimes not even that.”
Is it just me or do others find reading blogs without comments sad? I feel like I’m looking at the guy standing alone in the corner nursing his drink while the party rages around him.
Political or opinion-type blogs that is. Technical blogs usually don’t need commentary to thrive.
SMS is like instant, receive-anywhere email. It fills a niche: voice calls have too much overhead – with the obligatory greetings and salutations and “how’s the wife/kids/dog” you’re already a minute or two down, minimum. And for most people email is still only available at their computer. So SMS is great if you just want to leave a quick mesage that you know the recipient will almost certainly receive in the next couple of minutes.
Our ‘fad’ is flourishing!
WBW, it won’t continue to if you keep making the same comment on different blogs. People will get bored!
Kim says:
That’s a pretty poor reading of the song: it was hardly a prediction. The song was written in 1979, and laments events that took place in the 1950s, i.e., when TV overtook radio as the thing you switched on in the lounge room after dinner.
Blogs may be a fad but they meet a need for people to communicate outside the controlled world of the corporate press, TV and other media. It is a literate form of talkback radio where communication and interaction can occur. Blogs can be read or ignored but they are democratic. CB radio has really just morphed into massive mobile phone usage – the technology will also develop with blogs – same idea but different formats will inevitably unfold.
RSS may be one form – could someone enlighten me?
Luckily the tyrany of the majority is yet to assert itself in blog land. We don’t vote around here. Blogs are more an assertion of individualism or anarchy. Less concerned with control and more concerned with expression.
Well, SJ, I defer to you on that. I was dancing to it in that era, not paying attention to the lyrics or its historical significance.
A tale of two countries…
[With apologies to Dickens].
While in Australia, blogging is still easily dismissed as a fad akin to CB radio, in America bloggers have a defence fund against (external) lawsuits, and pols and presidential candidates have staffers dedicated to the blog…
What I most appreciate about blogs is that you can talk to people all over the world (or almost all over the world), specifically many people whose voice could not previously be heard outside their own countries, or within them for that matter. Reading international MSM still gives you just the MSM piece of things, but the blogosphere has it all.
Kim,
If you were bumping to the Buggles in 79 you might remember how at the peak of CB radio popularity in 1976 two l CB inspired songs hit the airwaves. The more famous was CW McCalls “Convoy”, a song which, in my opinion, the best that could be said about it was that it would have made good satire. Shortly afterwards the CB radio craze abated. A few years later a group called Player One released a single about the space invaders game which was an enormous fad at the time (as my second year law marks will attest!)and shortly afterwards the game entered a near terminal decline. If one can draw any conclusion about the predictive nature of music perhaps it is that once a “fad’ reaches the public consciousness such as to spawn a hit song (or a song you’d rather hit) the fad is teminal decline. Hence I hope no one releases a blogging inspired CD.
Guy Rundle on google…
A rejoinder to the Guy Rundle piece on blogs might be the fact that posts discussing his piece here, at John Quiggin’s, and at Ambit Gambit all appear in a google search of his name before the webpage of the magazine he edits.
……
As long as there are trucks hauling our every need all over the country – there will still be CB radio. Sure there are cell phones and Nextel but it’s not the same…
I am not a trucker