Earlier this week, Nick Currie (aka Momus) announced that he will be ending his weblog in February of 2010. Now, I usually think of Nick as being right on the bleeding edge of a good bit of digital culture, and I’m wondering now if his announcement isn’t the culmination of a a kind of sea change in the blogging world - indeed, blogging as a major creative activity seems to be winding down these days.
I truly think that Click Opera is the best blog on the internet. To me it exemplifies all the amazing things a great blog should aspire to be: excellent daily content that covers both a wide range of personal and public topics related to the author’s interests mixed with interesting graphic design, photography, and video, as well as a kind of digital hub to find other excellent related sites of interest, as well as a digital space for readers to comment and engage the author in discussion about his work (whew!). Really, there aren’t many places on the internet where you can get that kind of specific depth and engaging breadth all in one place. However, Momus does give some good reasons for leaving blogging behind:
Because the LiveJournal platform I’m using is being wound down (it has a skeleton staff of 8 right now, I’m told). Because there’s a kind of tumbleweed feel to my Friends List these days, as people migrate to Twitter (and “ship” their inconsequential tweets back to the old haunt as if to place a big “Nothing to see here folks!” sign over both locations) or Facebook. Because I don’t feel that blogging either can or should be as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one. Because I wonder what would happen if I put the energy I pour daily into this blog (and I’ve established a great working routine!) into something like a book, or something else. Because I think it’s good to force yourself to change, just for the sake of change. Because I don’t want to be a fifty year old man whose life revolves around a blog.
I’m most sympathetic to his points about the rise of Twitter and Facebook, and also that blogging won’t be “as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one.” I think that’s probably true. Which is not to say that I think blogging will go away. It most definitely won’t, but I do think most blogs will continue to evolve, which to me means either they will cease or step their game up to a whole different level.
What do I mean by that? People who’ve been blogging for some time are now familiar with the medium. They know what can be done well and what fairs poorly. Blogging has now or is rapidly becoming much less of a fad than it was three years ago. I think that the folks who stick around will probably only become better writers and their control of the medium will only continue to get better. People like Momus have paved the way and have shown what a great blog can and should be. Now, I think their will be other dedicated writers who will blaze down that same trail and continue to push the medium into new territory. But the pressing question for me is, “How/Will I be able to find them?”
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with friends about how all the awesome stuff I check out on the internet these days is at least two to three years old. I don’t feel like there is a a lot of great new content out there, even though the web itself has come along way in those intervening years.
When I look at the number of my friends who blog, the number has dropped from a high of about 12 in around 2004 to roughly 3 or 4 who keep their sites updated on at least a monthly basis. However, nearly everyone I know including some people’s grandparents are on Facebook or Twitter.
My google reader is littered with basically dead RSS feeds that once piped in some really good content from some really talented writers. How many great livejournals did I once read that now no longer exist?
Blogging has in some ways become more about celebrity: think dooce’s book deals and jason kottke being spotlighted in the New York Times. Some of The Great Blogs have become almost corporate in their scope of influence - they exert a kind of “normalizing” effect on the smaller blogs, either killing them off or reigning them in.
But the blog world will continue to turn. There are many bright spots: academic blogging is better than it’s ever been. Specialized music blogs continue to thrive. And then there are perhaps my favorites, the undead blogs - those unwieldy sites that have been killed by their authors only to rise again with perhaps a new color scheme or different url to feast on the collective intellect once more.
Alas, even my own humble home here on the web continues on in a kind of undead, zombie state. My original pact with Dave (and indeed the original scope of this particular incarnation of dcomeaux.com) was to document our college years. Document we did, and as soon as I was out of school, writing here took on a strange, sometimes unsettling new dimension. After all, our collegiate journeys began together but ended rather separately, so I wasn’t surprised that there was a bit of strangeness in the intervening time. But for me, there is some sense that this blog did actually die (in the sense that it’s original purpose was fulfilled) about two years ago, and yet somehow it carries on.
At first I found all this a bit unsettling, but now I find it somehow reassuring and a little amusing - it’s odd to be writing a zombie version of yourself!
Perhaps what we really need is a re-think of why we are blogging and what we are blogging for. I think Momus’ decision to move on signals (at least for me) a transition point in the still very early development of the blogging medium. Why blog in 2010? I’m looking forward to coming up with some very good answers to that challenge in the coming months.
