Blogs will Fade - RSS will Flourish
The Future of RSS is not Blogs says Sharon Housely, at the same time that Jeremy Zawodny is asking When will Blogs Peak?. Sharons post is a gem, and it's hard to find the best paragraph to quote, but i'll give it a try..
Like the Internet when it first started, blogs were emboldened by the "cool factor". As the novelty of being new and cool wears off, Internet webmasters and bloggers alike are realizing that maintaining a website or blog is time-consuming. "Coolness" often wears off if a channel is not monetized. With the ease of blogging and the array of blogs available, only a handful will be able to sustain fresh, constant, unique content and generate any sort of reasonable or significant revenue. As a result, blogs as we know them today will fade into the background, with many blogs being abandoned.
There, wasn't she good?
As far as blogs go, it's definately the "cool factor" that will fade. In the comments of Jeremy's post readers tend to agree, but having read Sharons post after that, it did seem to put it all into a little perspective for me - enyoy..
I don't know
I'd like to agree with her because most of the blogs out there are complete shit, but I don't know. Like free email I think there will be blogs out there as long as they are able to pay for their own bandwidth. And there are plenty of people who are in love with their own voice. Plus there is that affirmation thing going on, people want to belong to something. I think the 'community of soapboxes' are here to stay.
NFFC made me blog...
...and I feel so dirty now. hhh!
I think the ...
I think the 'community of soapboxes' are here to stay.
And the lazy will fade away? :)
Blogs can be a great filter
Blogs can be a great filter for finding neat stuff. That is pretty much part of what Threadwatch does - and there will always be a demand for that kind of blog.
Consolidation
May be some consolidation at the top, but I cant see a lot at the moment.
Future of RSS :-)
Hi Nick,
Glad to hear that you agree with my comments! My article was not as well recieved on slashdot :-(.
I just see businesses using RSS in increasingly innovative ways and feel that corporate use is the future. The article was not meant to disparage bloggers, heck, I have 5 blogs (but they are primarily for business use!) ;-)
Have a good weekend.
Sharon Housley
interesting
- about that corporate use. It made me think about intranets. Corporations have all these internal news-like sites, and for a large corporation they can become monster sites. Offering RSS feeds of the relevant sections will greatly improve usability in some of these cases.
Also, all the weekly status' and montly reports and such; in stead of spamming the whole meail system and filling up the typical exchange server, the relevant people could just subscribe to the relevant feeds.