Squash details the decline in hits in the tech blogosphere as well as in the quality of posts. He could be talking about the political blogosphere too. As reported here, AmericaBlog reported a large drop in ad income from Dec. 2005-Feb 2006 while DailyKos show a steep decline in hits starting in October 2005.
Back to Squash talking about the general dullness in tech blogging of late.
Here’s a question: When was the last time you found a really, great new voice. Who’s the hot new blogger? Late last year/earlier this year, there was a pretty significant influx of new bloggers into the game and personally I think we’ll look back and say that was the tech blogosphere’s golden age.
Ditto for political blogs. There’s been too much of the echo chamber syndrome, blogs blogging about what other blogs are blogging. Hopefully that doesn’t happen Polizeros. You may or may not agree with the politics here, but few other blogs cover the antiwar and immigrant rights movement like Polizeros. Or have an organizer who blogs.
However, something else might be causing this blog slowdown too, an outside process.
Simultaneous with the slowdown has been astromonical growth in another part of the Net, and it’s no doubt drawn millions (yes, millions) of blog readers away.
That would be MySpace.com.
I noticed this a few weeks back on a website I manage. They were getting more hits from MySpace than from Google, which seemed completely bizarre at the time but may just have been a precursor.
Concurrent with echo chamber blogs and declining new content, a new paradigm pops up, and away goes hordes of potential readers.
The good blogs will continue of course, the ones with something to say.
And, oh yeah, Polizeros is on MySpace now too, seems a good way to draw people here.
[tags] blogging, blogs, myspace[/tags]
[…] I blog about this in detail on my political blog, Politics in the Zeros. […]
Some amazingly positive news is that the student walkouts in LA, that took 2 yrs to organize in the late 60s, took about TWO DAYS this time, YES 2 DAYS, largely on the Internet through myspace.com and arising organically after the 1 million plus immigrants rights march on 3-25. Realizing the potential of the Internet–YES indeed!
Mayor Villaraigosa, being one of the walkout organizers in ’68 (with Senator Gil Cedillo and others now in power) found himself in the unenviable position of telling the students that when their parents walked out, they soon went back to school! He’s also trying to take over control of LAUSD, so it was a dicey time for him.
Coincidentally, the HBO film Walkout, about the ’68 walkouts, had just been released.
http://www.hbo.com/events/walkout/index.html