Glenn Reynolds points to this Boston Globe article that suggests weblogging might be just a fad. Maybe, but that might not be the tragedy the Globe writer Hiawatha Bray thinks it is. Here’s Bray has to say,
How long can that last? There are a number of rival blog companies to contend with. More troubling is the fact that three quarters of [Pyra’s Evan] Williams’ subscribers got bored and gave up. Blogs are far easier to maintain than traditional Web sites, but they still need more effort than most bloggers are willing to supply.
This suggests that blogging is an ephemeral fad, destined to burn itself out in a year or two.
This does not surprise me at all, but is it really any reason to consider the activity a fad? I’ve been an information and writing junkie since I was very young, and, for whatever reason, most people do not share in my particular obsession. Very few people are going to have the time or interest to post with the frequency that someone like Reynolds does.
But that’s not really necessary. According to Bray, 473,000 people have used Blogger alone to start weblogs (and that does not include, obviously, people using Manila, Conversant, SlashCode or any of other available tools). Bray thinks it is a problem that only 25 percent of those people still update their weblogs on a regular basis.
But lets do some number crunching. Suppose between all of the weblog tools available, there have been 600,000 weblogs started in the past few years. Now lets assume that by 2005 only 5 percent of those will still be updated regularly. That would leave 30,000 regularly updated weblogs.
In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 1999 there were barely over 10,000 newspapers in the United States. Of those only about 1,700 newspapers daily newspapers — the rest were either weekly or semiweekly.
In addition, there were almost 10,000 periodicals. Of those, only 648 were published weekly or semimonthly.
So even if only 5 percent of those people keep updating their weblogs regularly, there would still be a third more weblogs as there are newspapers and periodicals, and there would be far more frequently updated weblogs than newspaper and periodicals.
And, of course, that does not even take into account ongoing growth and creation of weblogs. The bottom line is that there are regularly updated weblogs on almost every topic imaginable and, moreover, for most topics there are far more weblogs than there is time to read them in a day.
Certainly many people will start and then abandon weblogs, just as many individuals and companies started and then abandoned various topical weblogs. But the tools are so cheap and the weblog idea so obvious, that weblogs are almost certainly here to stay.
Sources:
Pyra Labs at the forefront of Weblogging phenomenon. Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, March 25, 2002.
Communications and Information Technology (PDF) Statistical Abstract of the United States, U.S. Census Bureau, Table No. 931.