Orrorin’s Diary

I’ve been reading blogs for a long time, but only recently decided to participate actively in the community. Strangely, I read more and more often about top bloggers who decide to stop, post less or focus more on micro blogging. Jesse Stay wrote a post about the reasons for blogging which made me think. It is understandable that people don’t want to do the same thing over and over for years, or that after a while they don’t have much left to say. Like a teacher or preacher just repeating himself over and over, again and again; talking about the first version of the iPhone, then the second, the third, etc.  

Does it mean the end of blogging or just a need for fresh blood?

Top sporters remain at the highest level for a short while and usually decide to leave when their career has peaked. Bloggers might be of the same specimen, expecting the new generation to take over. I also noticed that many top bloggers have more than one blog and therefore shift their focus from one to the other. Based on some empirical data (from my own experience), I would say that a top blog’s life cycle stands around 3 to 5 years.

Many bloggers also discovered other tools they find more comfortable working with, writing headlines instead of full pages. Like the SMS on mobile phones, it shows again the need to convey “relevant” data as fast as possible. I have the feeling many bloggers move from a newspaper quality level to a tabloid. The scoop becomes more important than the relevance of the factual data.

I would also like to come back to the narcissist case. Social networks have been built on the need to position oneself in society and make more noise than the others. When speaking about noise, I believe Twitter and the others add to polluting the net rather than enforcing value. I recently joined Friendfeed which I find interesting, but it is also a huge waste of time.

I suppose this is the normal step that has to be taken, the same way we moved from .wav to .mp3 or .mpg to .divx. We compress our information and keep the dearest. Try however to listen to an mp3 on a high-end hi-fi and you will quickly realize your loss.

Even though we are mainly speaking of early adopters, those are the ones paving the way.

Is our future written? Are we supposed to become addicted and pass 80% of our time in front of our iPhone 4^th generation texting and sending videos to our neighbors on the other side of the world? Does it mean that to find real valuable information, we would be required to start reading again real newspapers? Or will they have to follow the same strategy in order to remain significant in a world based on speed?

I believe that today’s top bloggers have a big responsibility towards society. As they are the ones testing first the applications that might change the way we communicate; they should also carefully study the potential risks. Maybe those same people should launch together a new organization case studying all these new applications, categorize them and simulate the impact on the future generations.

Actually, it might be a fun job.

This is also a message to you all bloggers, in case you decide to stop, please find a way to archive your blog. As I stated before, I really believe each one of our blogs is a part of our culture that should be recorded!

Google started archiving books; maybe we should ask them to do the same with blogs…