This Blog Is Dying

Sorry, that's really an alarmist exaggeration designed to attract your attention and make you think you'll miss something if you don't pay attention to this post. I've been watching a lot of local TV news recently. Not by choice; it's what the gym TVs have been tuned to.

Anyway, according to this story, Blogger is one of several once-popular websites that are now rapidly becoming unpopular. Its demise is apparently coming because Twitter allows people to drop pithy comments into cyberspace without the bother of selecting a format, typing a lot of words or formulating a thought, and that's what most people used blogs for. The figures for the user decline seem accurate, but I don't know if you can say that means Blogger (and the other blogging host site mentioned, Typepad) are "dead or dying." Could mean that it's a shakeout and the number settles back to a smaller but steady user base. As far as I can tell, the use of specialized lingo and symbols like "RT" for re-tweet or repeat and the "hashtag" to indicate groups of topics may eventually overwhelm the 140-character limit of Twitter -- the average message may have so many introductory characters and abbreviations that the message itself will have to be about three words long.

I will say that two sites I would not be sorry to see leave are Gawker and Salon. The former is well described in a quote in the story by a former employee: “But you’re scooping the muck from the sewer and holding it up in your hand and saying, ‘Look at this. Smell this.’ ”

Up until about the middle of George W. Bush's first term as president, I regularly read Salon. I disagreed with a number of its writers about politics, but it had some first-rate reviewers and entertainment columnists. Although straightforwardly liberal, Salon hosted regular pieces by conservative activist David Horowitz and libertarian iconoclast Camile Paglia. And it had King Kaufman, one of the nation's best sports writers. But as the site apparently felt called to become more and more shrill and strident in its opposition to then-President Bush's policies, the variety of viewpoints it had featured dwindled away (A parallel might be Horowitz's own Front Page Magazine site in the current administration -- being conservative doesn't necessarily mean that one has to spend every waking moment slagging an ineffective and misguided leader whom one opposes, and thus FPM has become an infrequent stop on the Friar Cyber Tour). Kaufman stopped writing sports columns for the site in 2009, as the site's financial picture and staff reductions pushed him into an editorial role. He left in January of this year.

Salon, of course, takes a different view about the rumors of their death, impending or otherwise, saying that the site they use to track their traffic shows their independent page views up over this time last year. And the site that Fox.com used to measure the traffic is "notoriously unreliable." I dunno -- although I am prone to take a Fox report about Salon with a grain of salt, I'm not helped any by the Salon piece's tendency to throw round phrases like "notoriously unreliable" without backing that label up with some stats or quotes.

Anyway, as far as I know, I'm still here. And as long as I have fingers that work and the delusion that if circumstances and such had been different, I could have been Mike Royko, I guess I still will be.

But I wouldn't miss Gawker at all. And maybe TMZ could fold too.