Blogging 2007

What is it with blogs?

Lots of people have blogs today, everywhere and all kinds of blogs. There are serious businessblogs both from internet companies and from other traditional companies out there. You can find blogs about almost anything from sex and fashion to raising children in Minnesota. It seems everyone is blogging today.

The talk about the blogosphere death, blogging will end because there is no real interest for blogs.

A few newspapers has begun to talk about the death of the blogs. Since there is no real interest, they claim, there is no need for blogs and that will eventually stop people from writing. Lots of swedish journalists had blogs and then suddenly stopped blogging, all of them. They just decided one day to stop blogging. Claiming that blogging was dead. A few of them claimed that blogs made people abuse each other in comments and by mail, since it was so easy to stay anonymus.

The journalists are wrong, nothing more, nothing less.

The swedish journalists that had blogs are wrong, it is not the blogospheres fault that they stopped blogging. It isn't the blog that make people reply abusing the poster.  The problem was that the journalist didn't quite understand the blogosphere. This is because they blogged for the wrong reasons. And they believed they would be celebrated for their boldness and openmindedness because they started blogs. And, they thought they write much better then anyone else since they are well-know journalists.

In what way are they wrong then?

The biggst error they made is believing that since they are journalists they write more interesting stuff than other bloggers. This is not true, if you write about your potty-visit it is just that, you might get a few visitors because of your name but it is still crap. If you spend all day writing articles for a paper they are better because you spent all day writing them, lots of people can do that. But, if you just ruch away a blogpost in 5 minutes it isn't better than the thaught through blogposts of the serious bloggers.

Another big error was to think that they would be something special, they are special when it comes to newspapers because not many get the opportunity to write for a newspaper. When it comes to blogging though they are nothing special because the competition is much harder, lots of people have blogs and lots of them are very good at blogging. Suddenly becoming one among many and not even be better than the others must be a eye-opener even for the most rough skinned reporter. The thing you thought you were so good at, writing, is something that others do as good or better than you and they don't even get paid to do it.

The last big error was that since they were total internet rookies (most of them) they didn't understand that people reading stuff on the net are more critical than other readers. You can write any crap in a tabloid and people will believe you, at least some will. If you write the same stuff in a forum on the net or in a blog people tend to see it for what it is: Trolling. Trolling has been a known term for years on the net but rarely used to describe the articles in the papers. Think about it for a while, is there any difference between a headline in the sun or in the most trollish forum-post you have evere seen? And if they had understood this then they would have understood that if you are a troll, then you get paid with abuse.

Why they believe blogging is dead

From the reporters point of view blogging is of course dead since all the reporters have stopped blogging. This is a good reason for them to claim that all blogs are uninteresting. How can they possibly be interesting if no good writers actually write stuff in blogs? They also believe that blogging is boring, because it was boring to them. This is obviously because they blogged for the wrong reasons. Blogging to get fame or to get celebrated as an amazing blogger might work if you have the actual potential to get celebrated as an amazing blogger or if you blog is worth reading. There are very few blogs that actually manage to do this and the competition is tough. Most of the worlds bloggers blog for other reasons though, for the joy of writing, the need to present their point of veiw or maybe just for their friends to keep track of them.

Yet again the journalists were dead wrong, since people blog for their own personal reasons instead of blogging for fame, glroy or money as the jounralists did, they wont stop blogging just because of a bunch of journalists not getting the fame they expected.

Is blogging dead?

No, as long as people have the chance to express themselves or their opinions they will, this is a fundamentual part of being a human. Almost all the nations in the world has understood this and that is the basic reason for the different laws of free speech around the world. We have a need to tell people what we think.