Joseph Geierman

Earlier today, a friend of mine linked to a post about the death of blogging. More specifically the article posits that blogging is dead as a vehicle for publishing independent voices (read not part of the “Mainstream Media”).  The following excerpt cuts to the crux of his argument:

Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

To some extent, this is true – but I think it misses the whole point of blogging in the first place. The power of the platform was never that Joe Blow could become a “star” or rise to the Technorati Top 100 – it was simply the promise of an easy way for anyone (from a large corporation to a guy in his living-room) to publish on the Internet.

The author is right that the days of someone starting a blog, writing about their day-to-day thoughts, and becoming wildly popular are mostly over. There are lots of niche subjects, however, that are not going to make oodles of money (or that would not make enough to be worth hiring writers) and so are always going to be labors of love.  Example of these include blogs about small town politics, candy, knitting and even grocery store history and design, .  No one’s going to be able to get rich writing them, but their authors continue do it anyway because they are passionate about their subjects.  None of them are probably ever going to make it to the Technorati Top 100, but to people who are interested in their topics, they can be must-reads.

It is this specialization, along with the power of RSS feeds, which has made blogging such a powerful tool. If you’re looking for fame or lots of money, you’re probably not going to get it from writing a blog – but if you are passionate about a subject and want to share that passion with others who have the same interests, then blogging is just as relevant today as it was in 2003.  Maybe it’s actually an even better platform now, actually, because you can reach many more people (since more are online) and the blogging tools have improved a lot in the last 5 years.