Could the world of blogging be about to take a nose dive into the world of historic internet fads? Surely not…
Everywhere you turn you see abandoned blogs, redundant blogger accounts and washed up wordpress installations. Blogging has become the internet’s trash 2.0. But why? A tool so accessible, easy to use and fundamentally liberating is in dire danger of becoming, “pointless”.
It stirs from the fact that blogging is no longer restricted to web developers and the few tech savvy individuals on the net. Now, every man and his dog are offering some sort of ‘blogging’ service (I’m sure we could all list about 10, so we wont bore you). Everyone has a blog. Me. You. Everyone.
Out of every hundred or so blogs that are launched daily, a grim stab in the dark would suggest 95% of these are simply – abandoned. Why? Are people lazy? Do they not know what they are doing? Can they just not be bothered? Lets look…
Content. The bones, the brains, the everything of a web-blog. Content on a blog, is like water to an ocean. Yet nearly all failing blogs have the same issue – lack of content. To some, a mere 15 mins in each day is a chore, something to worry about – many either forget to post daily or just can’t be bothered. Others start blogs on subjects they have no interest in and/or not expertise. This makes it hard to update and again damages a bloggers self confidence and dedication.
Due to the pressures of making money in the modern society, even blogging has become a revenue stream. Now don’t get me wrong, this is a potentially huge earner; but you need traffic – how do you get traffic? Quality content.
Most bloggers miss the point and think a few half-hearted posts here and there will bring in some traffic and in turn make some money. Sadly they are wrong. Failure to make instant cash, deems to many, blogging as a poor source of income; and so we start getting ‘abandoned blogs’.
Besides the issue of content, another reason for the burst in the blog boom can be attributed to the idea that many blogging software packages rival some of the neatest CMS packages. In particular we’re talking about WordPress. The advances of wordpress over the years have turned it into one of the biggest, easiest to implement, free CMS’s out there. Fantastic. Or is it?
WordPress now, is so tuned up, so advanced that people have failed to do the simple things, blogging daily, gaining readership and keeping active. Now, blogs don’t even look like blogs, nor do they feel or act like blogs. The amount of plugins available make it almost impossible for a reader to detect the ‘blog’ elements within a site. This has damaged blogging as a whole. No longer are people tempted by the simplicity of creating a small blog to post up ideas/thoughts etc, they want to go bigger. Blogging is being replaced by the ‘user friendly, CMS’ boom.
In my opinion, to conclude; the blogging culture has been damaged. Whether things will run in full circle, and people will put the advantages of CMS type features to one side, and return to old fashioned blogging, remains to be seen. If it doesn’t return, where do we go now? Think twitter…