500 years of Newspapers – How many years of blogs?

While the blogging “industry” is still in it’s infancy, I wonder if the blogosphere will have the lifespan of a giant tortoise at close to 200 years in captivity or the less than a decade lifespan of the Betamax videocassette.  Will blogs continue to evolve or will they one day follow the newspapers into the world of cold and harsh oblivion>?

Let’s briefly consider the life spans of the newspaper and the blog to begin to look towards the future.

The Roots of Blogging

While there there is no official start date for the blogging revolution, the earliest form of blogging dates back to 1997.  On December 17th 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” when he described the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that “logged” all the Internet sites he visited.  Then in October of 1998, Open Diary launched with software to make reader commenting available to a wide audience.  The software continued to develop and in 2003, with the release of both TypePad and WordPress, blogging began to explode.

The Deep Roots of the Newspaper

The newspaper story began some five centuries ago in Europe where merchants would distribute hand written newsletters containing information about the the weather, economic conditions and usually wars.  In this study of changing media – it’s interesting to note that the same topics are still featured in today’s newspapers.  While the technology of how we communicate new has evolved – in many ways the content of the news has evolved very little over the centuries.

The newspaper industry expanded worldwide and many will say that it reached its peak in the early 1970s when two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down a United States President. But the following decades have not been kind to the newspaper industry and amidst the worldwide recession and the rapid growth of blogs, the newspaper is now an endangered species.

What are the signs of a fading media?

Today many a blog is being written about the death of the newspaper and many are criticizing the newspaper industry for failing to adapt to the changing market conditions.  I wonder if blogging will, like the newspaper, last for more than 500 year or if someday soon the successor to the blog will have the last laugh talking about how bloggers failed to adapt to changing market conditions.

Personally, I think that blogging will survive for decades to come – but the world can’t support 184 million blogs – there just are not enough people with enough time to read to support that many blogs.  This really hit home as I have been helping with the social media for a large Children’s Festival.  The Festival organizers want to tap into the blogosphere and get more publicity.  However, as I search for blogs to work with I have been amazed how many of the mommy blogs, family activity blogs and parenting blogs are essentially dormant.  I am finding the vast majority of the blogs have had less than 2 posts in 2009.

The “Have” Blogs and the “Have Not” Blogs

Just like in society where you have a limited number of people with LOTS of money and masses of people looking to make more money – I see the same happening to the world of blogs.  The few, the mighty and the strong blogs will survive and thrive – but the age of blogging offering everybody a voice will fade away.  Hopefully, bloggers reading blogs with great ideas like Blogging Tips will be among the survivors – but it will take hard work to gain the traffic to keep your blog at the top of the blogging heap.

I wonder what blogging tips and analytics tips bloggers are using to make sure that they stay ahead of the curve and can build a blog that might someday rival the giant tortoise of the giants of newspaper for longevity.

Written by David Silversmith from Info Musing
Posted on August 5th, 2009 and filed under Blogging News
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