After the Gold Rush?

March 1, 2006 in Latest from Arc Iris, design and blogging | No comments

As someone who has just jumped into the blogosphere and finds myself gradually sinking under the weight of opinion (which I feel compelled to add to here, of course)- I am trying to work out whether we are in the throes of another dot-com boom, but this time it’s called ‘blogging’. Back then everyone jumped on the bandwagon, with promises of gold at the end of the rainbow, but the bandwagon was rather flimsy and it’s wheels fell off before we could get to the gold.So now the bandwagon has been repaired and on we get again, still full of hope but slightly warier than the first time, for example Amy from contentious.com believes that there is some mileage left in blogs:

The blogosphere is falling! The blogosphere is falling!” Well, so says Daniel Gross in Slate’s “Twilight of the Blogs” – the latest in a flurry of mainstream media articles about how the business potential of weblogs is allegedly imploding.’

yet here’s a comment on that post: ‘I believe blogging has wasted multi trillions of hours of millions of humans from all over the world just for the sake of earning a few pennies from contextual advertisers that even don’t tell how much percentage is offered to you! WOW! Hat’s off for the mind job! I believe technology builds as well as kills! It’s YOUR choice whether you want to remain in the scene when it’s time for killings :)

I believe there’s only ONE small nail required to burst a whole huge bubble… and I’m sure this may happen anytime now and it will be a chain reaction… I wish it SHOULD happen so that it cleans up the hype and put all people on actual business that pays back decently for all their efforts!’
Here’s a slightly more considered comment from Mark Evans, this time about podcasts (essentially part of the same phenomenon of course):

‘Podcast Hype Alive & Well

…to my way of thinking, it’s difficult not to get the feeling that consulting firms have become too excited about the renewed interest in technology. With so much interest, there is a huge opportunity for these consulting firms to sell research to people who think they need to know what’s happening. It should be pointed out the research firms (Forrester, Yankee Group, IDC, Gartner) played this game during the dot-com boom. While many of their projections failed to play out as expected at the time, many of their forecasts now materializing – albeit a few years later than what they envisioned.’

I believe we should step back from the mad rush to try and squeeze every drop of money out of this thing as quickly as possible (of course that’s not going to happen, but still) and consider the blogosphere as a kind of living organism, to be studied like any other, and accept its contractions and expansions as something natural, and above all, a sign that it is alive. To finish this post, I’ll quote a nice description of blogging i found on the Bloggy Network site, written by Ahmed Farooq, one of that site’s founders:

‘Blog Flux Joins the Bloggy Network (and brings its little brothers)

Blogging is more than just ‘posting.’It is about building a community; it is about finding other blogs; it is about building relationships. So while blog networks were springing left and right, no one approached blogging as an entire ’sphere’ – and not just a collection of sites posting posts but part of something bigger.’