Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live

el reg

SXSW Science fiction writer and professional pundit Bruce Sterling has cracked bloggers with the extinction stick, saying the plebs will crawl back into their ooze by 2017.

“There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good,” Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. “Well, no, actually. They don’t.”

“I don’t think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.”

The great blog nation seemed unthreatened by Sterling’s comments, as they giggled away at his tone and language. Such satisfaction struck us odd given that most of the SXSW panels touched on blogging in one way or another and around 80 per cent of the attendees claimed to run a blog.

I think he’s right on some things, and wrong on others; ten year from now my opinion is that:

  1. blogs will have evolved into several dozen more and different things.
  2. blogging will just be what people do, without any fanfare about it.

In short, it will morph and it will sediment.

Specific blog search engines will go away, for much of the same reasons that the Semantic Web will never get built – technology will advance to the point where they/it will become indistinguishable from the InterWeb (or InterTube?).

It’ll be like breathing.

⊞

Comments

5 responses to “Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live”

  1. Adriana
    re: Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live

    Well, more than 500 years after printing press came along, books have no gone away. Oh wait, books were around before printing press right?

    Who cares about what you call it, book, pamphlet or a blog… as long as it helps individuals to communicate and share knowledge. And that’s not going to go away. Hopefully.

    Reply
  2. Chris Samuel
    re: Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live

    I think you’re both right.

    Blogs are an implementation of interactive communication, in a similar way that BBS’s were before. The implementation may evolve/morph but the meme remains the same.

    Reply
  3. Stephen Usher
    re: Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live

    I agree. Basically, in even 5 years time the hype will be over. Actually in 5 years time blogging et al will be unfashionable as it goes through the backlash phase where people have been disillusioned by the fact that the excesses of the hype haven’t been forfilled.

    After that the whole “new media” thing will normalise and chug along in the background and become invisibly mundane. i.e. it will mature.

    In ten years time there will be a lot fewer bloggers and probably even fewer readers, but that won’t matter. The audience will probably either be close friends of the bloggers who use it to keep up to date with events in their friends’ lives while they’re not able to keep in touch on a one-to-one basis or readers of opinion/editorial style blogs, similar to Cringley’s missives.

    A few corporate blogs may still exist but they will be low key affairs and probably mostly ignored by the marketting departments (which is a good thing).

    Wiki’s will also become work-a-day tools with smaller ambitions and scope, but because of that they will probably be more useful.

    Such is the way of most technologies. When the telephone first came out you had masses of hype, telephone bars etc. Today you’d think someone silly for trying to hype the telephone.. it’s a background technology, it’s matured, it works.

    Reply
  4. alecm
    re: Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live

    Yeah, Steve, but what do you think blogs *are*?

    >When the telephone first came out you had masses of hype, telephone bars etc. Today you’d think someone silly for trying to hype the telephone.. it’s a background technology, it’s matured, it works.

    Yes… and everyone has telephones now, sometimes several, occasionally scores, and they are critical to life and how we talk to each other, one to one.

    Blogs are how we talk to each other, one to many. That’s not going to go away in a “GAME OVER. RESET?” kinda way.

    The people who said phones are a fad and will fade away are all dead. The world will change. Why not jump on a wave, sometime ?

    Reply
  5. Stephen Usher
    re: Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live

    Well, in my opinion there are several types of media which are bundled up into the term “blog” because they use a roughly similar technology:

    (1) Personal journals which are in a public place. (2) Opinion editorials by professional or semi-professional commentators (who may also be specialists in that field). (3) A combination of the two above. (4) Marketting devices used by cynical corporations to make tem seem chummy to their target demographic. (5) A true journal of an individual within a corporation detailing the ups and downs of internal corporate life. (Which superficially may look like (4).)

    The problem comes when (4) tries to look like any of the others, especially if it’s camoflaged so that it’s hard or impossible to tell that it is a cynical marketting ploy.

    Anyway, that’s not the subject at hand. In 10 years time no doubt the first three will still be around, the fourth will probably be out of fashion and for the majority of corporations so will the fifth.

    I never said anything about a “GAME OVER. RESET?” type thing, merely the normal “Hype->Disillusionment->Maturity” lifecycle of all these technological bubbles.

    Reply

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