Opinion: In time, the buzz will die down, and the blogs that survive will wind up looking and reading more like "traditional" media.I am at the beginning of maybe doing what for me would be a major blog project. So, I am spending a lot of time thinking about what makes blogs different from other mediums. As best I can tell—and maybe I am missing something—the answer is: not much.
As the Catalyst Group's recent blog usability study (here in PDF form) found, new users don't understand what a blog is when they see one, and most blogs aren't even labeled as such.
Further, the whole RSS/XML thing is way too confusing, and it will need to be replaced by some other nomenclature if it is to become ubiquitous. May I suggest simply changing the name of the feature now known as RSS to what it really is: "subscribe."
And, yes, as the Catalyst participants noted, "postings" and "articles" are really the same thing. A long posting might also be called a "column," which is how I think of them. Write 600 to 1,000 words and it's a column, regardless of what someone else might call it. Make yourself happy.
Click here to read David Coursey's companion column, titled "Study Shows Users' Confusion About Blogs."
"Blogging is this decade's citizens' band radio," wrote reader Curt Gowan. "A fad which booms insanely then drops back to a much, much lower level of activity that is sustainable and actually useful."
I think Curt captured the current state of blogging quite nicely, which is to say I wish I'd thought of the comparison first. In the 1970s, during the height of the CB boom, I was living not far from Garland, Texas, a blue-collar Dallas suburb that had distinction of having the highest number of CB radios, per capita, of any city in the country. And, yes, my family's call sign was KZD-1744.
For a while, it looked like CB would really change things, offering people a better (and free) means to communicate in the pre-cellular age.
It might have worked out like that, save that Garland also had the largest per capita number of "yay-hoos" of any city in America, and they took to CB radio like mosquitoes to a duck hunter. But Garland wasn't alone, and the CB radio meltdown was rapid, deep and nationwide.
The failure of CB radio was born in its success. Reduce the user population to a manageable number and today CB mostly works like it's supposed to. (But, CB has also been significantly been replaced by Family Radio Service [FRS] UHF handie-talkies that have proven more useful than CB ever was, at least for reliable short-range communications. But that's another story.) (Want to talk farther? Get a ham radio license.)
I am expecting blogs (and Podcasts, for that matter) to be all the rage until some moment when, almost as though a switch had been flipped, they don't seem so exciting anymore.
By that time, blogs and "traditional" media will have shared so much DNA that whatever differences once existed will no longer be apparent.
Click here to read a recent David Coursey column on Podcasting.
From a technology standpoint, I believe this means Web sites will make it easier to subscribe to content, perhaps using RSS as the underlying technology. But this is only if there is some way for content providers to monetize this distribution. Right now, RSS seems like an ad-hostile environment, but I am betting that will change.
The danger is that instead of delivering real content, RSS will be used to deliver useless teases of the type that TV news is so fond.
"What local mayor has been accused of murdering the entire city council? Find out at 11!" I need real content delivered to my desktop, not just a promise of content.
This is the same problem I have with many, even most, blog postings. These aren't column, articles or anything more than a link and a paragraph or two of comment and description.
I don't find these terribly satisfying, and sometimes they are most of what you find in a blog search—100 posts all leading to a single page. Not very efficient.
What may end up differentiating blogs from traditional Web media won't be technology as much as style. Blogs are too often just content for people with short attention spans, and not much interest in where the content actually comes from or the agenda that drives it.
I would also suggest that a 600-word blog post violates what blogs are supposed to be all about, but maybe that's a lack of imagination on my part.
Blogs are often a shorthand way of addressing issues and ideas that leave the sorting out to someone else.
Unfortunately, many readers will never get to that stage, and blogs will just leave them thinking they know a lot when they actually understand little.
As someone once wrote, "A walk across the ocean of most men's minds will scarcely get your feet wet." The quote would apply to blogs as well.
Blogs also lack, for the most part, predictability. Maybe the iPod shuffle generation likes a random walk down the information superhighway, but I want to know what I'm going to find before I invest my time in getting there. That's where a merging of blogs and traditional media branding will help.
Today's blogs, however, seemed to be based around a certain spontaneity that traditional branding seems to work against.
Successful blogs will be about something, just like successful magazines, newsletters, columns and other written media.
But this brings me back to where I began: Except for short posts, lots of links, a certain "right now" feel, and easy production, I am not sure how blogs are all that different. Maybe those differences are enough, but blogs are more a subset of traditional media than something unique.
Rather, blogs are just a tool for formatting and, perhaps, delivering certain kinds of information, to be used where they make sense in an overall mix of content.
The current blog craze will prove a self-limiting phenomenon that crashes under its own weight as readers notice they are spending more time with blogs than traditional media and getting less from it.
Contributing editor David Coursey has spent two decades writing about hardware, software and communications for business customers. He can be reached at david_coursey@ziffdavis.com.
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