GlennLog

Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo

< Canning Spam | Main | Run a Mailing List? You Have to CAN SPAM, Too! >

December 23, 2003

Blognemia

I just posted my first entry to my personal blog in over a month. I had this theory -- and it's just a theory -- that over the last few years blogging thrived as did community wireless networking groups because so many technically adept people were unemployed and underemployed. There are plenty of examples that defy this characterization, but you'll often find the most prolific bloggers have time on their hands, like myself.

Whenever I get busy, my blog dwindles. You can practically draw a revenue/work graph line against frequency of posts. I've been devoting an increasing amount of time this fall (as well as money) to Wi-Fi Networking News, which is a blog, but it's a professional and journalistic one. Why? Because it has revenue from advertising. I've even hired a contract writer to help me keep up with the flow of news.

In the early commercial Internet, many of the best-known sites had the least money, staff, and corporate interests behind them. They were labors of love created by clever people. In 1996, I sold my Web development company because I believed that by 1997, the Web would be taken over by slick development efforts fed by powerful backends that would allow, say, IBM's site to be substantially more satisfying than sites that I could develop.

I was wrong, but only for a while. Companies poured money into Web sites built mostly by people who weren't very clever -- lots of advertising agencies and development firms spent a lot of client money building things that didn't work. After the hekatomb of 2000, the sites that remain are generally highly functional, and the best sites are often now the most corporate. They figured out the most efficient way to best serve the most people. Exceptions abound there, too, of course, but it's hard to create a big splash with a small site.

(Actually, I'd cite JiWire, a site for which I am the senior editor but was not involved in the programming of, as a great counter-example to my thesis: with just three programmers using JSP, the site is phenomenally useful and apparently quite easy to maintain and expand. Intel licensed JiWire's hotspot directory, which I think proves the point.)

I expect blogging is trending this way. Clay Shirky, of course, said it best and most succinctly, but in brief more and more people and news stories point to fewer and fewer blogs that have ever-increasing traffic and revenue (or funding, not the same thing).

The fact that many people read a few blogs doesn't reduce the importance when you have niche audiences of small numbers reading many blogs. This blog is read by a few hundred people a day, mostly friends and colleagues, and it doesn't diminish my interest in writing here to know that. Likewise, my Wi-Fi blog is read by several thousand people today, a drop in the tech bucket, but I know many of those thousands of people, and they're folks deeply involved in creating the technology and products of the industry. We have a conversation on that blog, even though it's a news site.

What's my point here? If you don't hear much from me, congratulate me. I must be doing well. If you see vast numbers of posts on Wi-Fi Networking News, ditto.

Posted by Glennf at December 23, 2003 8:47 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:

Comments