The End of Blogging

[WestVirginiaRebel]

New York Observer:

"I don't really see a blog business," said Nick Denton over gchat. He still wasn't sold on the idea of an interview regarding his sites' redesign, scheduled to debut tomorrow, and seemed to be attempting an escape. "I should find you that old post in which I compare blog ad revenues to McDonald's franchises, i.e. piffling."

Ah! But! Surely they aren't so McDonald's-sized now?

"Well, the McDonald's reference was from five years ago—when I was downplaying the revenue potential of blogs," he said, then paused for exactly one minute. "Things did move on from then."

Whatever blogs have become, there seems to be universal agreement that the format that made them ubiquitous—the reverse-chronological aggregation accompanied by commentary—is not long for this world, and Mr. Denton's scoop-friendly redesign would seem to be the best evidence of that. In fact, the decline of the blog has come so quickly, one has to wonder whether we ever really liked the medium at all.

"From the beginning, I didn't call the sites 'blogs,'" said Dan Abrams, who launched his Mediaite network in 2009. "And that's true because I always had this vision of them being more than just advertising-supported, ah, well, blogs. You know, whatever the word is."

"What is blogging?" asked Lockhart Steele, publisher of the Curbed network. "Is what Capital New York is doing, do you consider that blogging? Well, yes and no."

"It always has been an embarrassing word," The Awl's Choire Sicha said. "First it was embarrassing because bloggers were these dirty, horrible people, and then it was embarrassing because our grandmas have blogs, God bless them."
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Is blogging dead? Excuse me while I go have an existential crisis...