Going the Way of the Dinosaur

This just in: Apparently blogging's going the way of hoop skirts and the rubiks cube.

Anybody remember around the turn of the century – right after the dotcom bubble burst, I believe – when people were predicting that the internet was nothing more than a passing fad? That people had gotten sick of it and were going to move on? Well, I do even if that's not factually accurate. My memories not the most trustworthy but, also, those predictions turned out to be completely false. That usually tends to happen when people predict the future. I don't see any flying cars or robot servants walking around even though according to this highly respected source, there should be by now. At least the prototypes for them, anyway. The thing about future predictions is that no one really remembers when you're wrong but they will if you're right (something people who were predicting no small end of success in the current Iraq War probably know very well by now.) so it's alright to make wild speculations.

However, as a proud member of the blogosphere and its grassroots ethos let me, if I may, make a of a rebuttal. I'm sure I'm not the only one or even the best to do so but, well, the blogosphere speaks in many voices so here's what mine says.

Mr. Plummer, you say it's a bad sign that roughly half of blogs have been abandoned. But do you know how many businesses fail in the first year alone? I can't say I really do, either, but according to this (which I obtained through about five minutes of Google searching, I'd expect someone at your firm to have much better resources on hand.) it's something like 80~90%. And since they also say businesses have only about a 9% chance of surviving as long as ten years that means that most people are “in and out” of that thing as well. However, I don't think you could claim that business is a passing fad. Not with a straight face, anyway. That's, of course, because it's been around in one way or another for hundreds and hundreds of years. We're barely a few decades into the internet being widely available. And even less for the technologies that make blogs available and popular. If you went back to when printing presses or typewriters were first being made available then probably just as many people who adopted them would be abandoning them. And for just about as many reasons – it just might not take place as fast or as easily as it does with blogs because the progress of communications technology has been to get cheaper and more widely disseminated. So, it's not at all surprising that blogs are dropping by the wayside when it's trivially easy to create one and just as easy to walk away. The question isn't really how many people are going to be using them next year or the year after that – but how many people are going to be using them 50 years from now when the technology is much more mature. I'm not going to be so bold as to make my own predictions but I expect that not only will it only vaguely resemble what we call a “blog” today but it's going to be fairly widespread. Because it may well be true that everyone who might want a blog has started one today – I know I just made mine – but what about the people who'll come after us tomorrow?