Are Blogs Dying?

Marshall Kirkpatrick recently griped about Ask.com’s blog search service closing down.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, R.I.P. World’s Greatest Blogsearch

Searching the blogs, scanning the posts, feed-powered search: there used to be more startups offering blogsearch than there are characters in a Twitter message today. But no more. Today blogsearch engines fade away all the time and almost no one notices.

But when Ask.com shuttered its blogsearch engine this month, I noticed. It made me sad, because it was the best blogsearch engine in the whole world. And now it’s gone. You, dear reader, probably didn’t even notice. But let me explain what we’re missing out on now that it’s gone.

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That’s a real shame.

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Sometimes you’re looking to see what experts in a field are writing in long-form on their blogs. Not spitting out on Twitter. Not posting on a static website. Blog posts. There is an incredible body of knowledge in that medium, and search by popularity was a really useful way to sort it. Surely someone offers a similar service. Who?

Bruce Sterling, who noticed Kirkpatrick’s howling when I hadn’t, suggests that it’s not just the difficulty of competing with Google blog search, but that blogs are dying as a medium:

Bruce Sterling, Dead Media Beat: blog search

Why does ‘almost no one notice’ that blogsearch enterprises are fading away? Because nobody notices that blogs are fading away. The technical ecosystem around blogs is disintegrating, being folded into other structures. Three years ago, I said at SXSW that there wouldn’t be many blogs around in ten years. That leaves ‘em seven years to continue to dwindle in interest and relevance. There will still be SOME blogs in seven years, no matter how firmly disintermediated they are by social media, and the many things that follow social media. There are still some personal computer bulletin board systems around today, too. But look at the trend. Compare today’s reality to the hectic illusions surrounding blogs three years ago.

There is certainly something to what Bruce has to say. Interest in long-format blogging is dropping, even while it is being incorporated into traditional media.

The rise of streaming tools, though, is leading to a new state, where long-format blogging is being imploded, turned into content for the short-format stream, like radio was cannibalized for TV.

We’ll see a new logical layering. At the bottom will be the web of pages, a vast archive of HTML connected by links: a giant hypertext.

At the top will be the web of flow, as typified now by Twitter microstreaming. Users will consider themsleves as ‘logged into’ Twitter (or other microstreams) where microsyntactic references, via URLs, hashtags, or other techniques will allow users to pull in larger format or richer content, like text, audio, video, or images. This is where people will operate, share, comment, question, and argue converationally.

In between will be a swirling nexus of ‘engines of meaning’ — algorithms and filters, assemblages and indexes, and the social networks where we connect — tools that people use to mark, retain, annotate, and find snippets of meaning.

This inherently devalues the materials accumulating at the bottom, like last week’s newspapers, old issues of magazines, and yesterday’s blog posts.

A few years ago we seemed to live in our RSS readers, and the metronome of our media diet was timed to author’s posting cycles, or our feeding cycles which was more like the daily newspaper than a stock ticker.

We’ve shifted to stream time, and the tempo is much, much faster.

Techmeme seems slow, when it formerly seemed like the breakingest place to be for tech.

And the great majority of chatter about the breaking news stories is in the stream, not in the comments on blogs, and not in the blogs themselves. While a great deal of thoughtful and expository writing still goes on, the average joe is dropping out of long format writing, even as an aspiration. It’s easier to just talk, and tweeting (or Facebook) seems more like talking or texting, and less hard work.