IP Democracy: Where Have All the Blogs Gone?

In the wake of Techmeme's launch of its top 100 Leaderboard sites, it's clear that blogging is, if not dead, then morphing into something quite different than what it started out to be. And today's announcement that the Huffington Post "blog" will hire Betsy Morgan, currently General Manager of CBSnews.com, as its new CEO makes official the end of the blogging era.

Techmeme, widely understood to be a "blog" aggregator, counts very few true "blogs" in its ranking, as Scott Karp points out. Not only does the list include many old media mainstays such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, along with top trade publications such as Computerworld, but it is also heavily tilted toward new media "brands" formerly known as blogs such as GigaOm, TechCrunch and Engadget.

What really struck me about the Techmeme leaderboard (beyond, of course, Publishing 2.0 debuting at #58) is how it is dominated by media brands. And when I say media brands, I mean TechCrunch, GigaOm, Search Engine Land, Engadget and Gizmodo. There are very few “blogs” on in the “traditional” sense, i.e. a SINGLE voice, like Dave Winer or Jeff Jarvis. There are many media brands that use blogging software, that have comments and trackbacks, that encourage their writers to have a distinctive voice — these media brands certainly retain their blog roots.

I would add that yet another blog that is not a blog is Rafat Ali's paidcontent.org. All of these sites -- TechCrunch, GigaOm, Engadget, and paidcontent.org, plus many others -- are big deal media concerns, albeit still in their earliest stages of development, backed by venture capital and staffed by professional writers, editors, graphic designers and sales people. Nothing about them says "blogs," if by blog you mean a true web log that reflects an individual's take on a particular topic, or just life in general.

These guys are go-for-broke publishing concerns that face the same issues (staffing, accounting controls, growth strategies, compensation policies, editorial expertise, ad sales and so forth) as any bona fide media business. Robert Scoble, in a post that he entitled "TechMeme List Heralds Death of Blogging," counted a mere 12 blogs in Techmeme's leaderboard.

While the actual number of blogs on the list is probably higher than that, the point is: blogging seems to have been (and might still be) a mere waystation along the road to becoming a true publishing company and not quite the democratizing force in publishing that it once promised to be. Om and Rafat and TechCrunch's Mike Arrington and everybody else used the rise of blogging software to inexpensively launch publications, just like any other publisher, and are now legitimate publishers.

Likewise, Arianna Huffington's first-rate site rose to number five on Technorati's list as a "blog," but is now, as the hiring of Harvard MBA Betsy Morgan attests, a full-fledged publishing business. As this USA Today profile of Huffington (which is ironically entitled "Huffington's Vision Prospers on Blog") notes

Huffington is trying to remake the Post into more of an all-purpose digital newspaper, with sections devoted to lifestyles, business, media and entertainment.

So, the Huffington Post is no longer a "blog." It's a digital newspaper.

What then happens to real blogs? (And by real blogs, I don't mean the corporate blogs that companies use for PR or the often lame blogs that newspapers have felt compelled to launch. I mean the interesting kinds of personal publications that offered readers a specific and often expert bit of information on an issue, topic, development or trend.)

Is blogging now nothing more than a proving ground for would-be publishers, constantly providing a cheap and easy way to enter the market and quickly exit it if the blog is not a "success"? Will real blogs disappear now that most individuals have their own blogs in the form of Facebook or Myspace profiles?

Should we even call any of this stuff blogging anymore? Isn't it just writing or journalism or opinion, only on the web and powered by Drupal or Movable Type or WordPress instead of proprietary in-house publishing systems?

That's far too many questions to lob at a reader, I know, but Techmeme's Leaderboard has, indeed, sparked a lot of doubt in my mind about whether blogging is dead or merely transformed. And the Huffington Post's acquisition of a major media company's top manager of online news publishing only further underscores that blogging is now a big business.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 2, 2007 2:35 PM to IP Democracy