The Blogosphere is dead. Long live blogging.

Back in March, I blogged about what "blogging" is. (After some internal debate over whether it was too much of a navel-gazing, "meta" topic to spend time writing about.)

Whether it's part of a single collection of data or scattered across various websites is irrelevant. It's simply the kind of activity that was done by "webmasters" back in the 90's, and is done by bloggers, Facebookers and MySpacers today; actively creating content on the internet. But how you define a blogger definitely shapes how you answer what might be a bigger question.

Is blogging now mainstream?

Today, I read an interesting post on Nicholas Carr's blog on the death of the blogosphere. Apparently sparked off by an article on The Economist on how blogging has grown up and entered the mainstream.

I think it's definitely true that blogging has changed from what it used to be; the key thing about blogs is, and always has been, that anyone can do them- but the implications of this have changed over the short lifetime of blogging. In the same way that in a few short years in the 1970s, the punk rock mentality of the late 1970s went from being a small anti-establishment subculture, exploded into a major media phenomenon, until what started out as a deliberately confrontational philosophy turned into the kind of imagery seen alongside red double decker buses, black taxis and laminated photographs of Princess Diana in London's tourist shops.

In the early days of blogging- say, 5-8 years ago, the big impact of anyone being able to self-publish was all about the democratisation of media; a lone blogger with some time on their hands could write something that the whole world could see. It was interesting, even exciting, to find someone whose story was worth reading. Sure, there were plenty of blogs that were no more interesting than the ordinary and average people who were writing about what they had for their tea that day (at this point, I have to say that I'm glad that I'm not a few years younger, so my own teenage thoughts were confined to a notebook- now long lost- rather than living forever somewhere in Google's index or on the Way Back machine.)

There were also web sites built on free hosting services like Geocities or Angelfire, the spiritual forefathers of MySpace; pages built by amateur web designers with little regard for matters like taste or style- let alone usability... I'm thinking of my own early adventures into the world of the web here- which I've just discovered still exists but, needless to say, I'm not going to link to it!

I think it was just as much about knowing that you'd stumbled across something yourself that made it feel like it was "yours"; not something you'd been emailled or saw on Popbitch, but that you found yourself; in the same way that a YouTube video shown on TV somehow doesn't seem as interesting as one that you stumble across or get sent on Facebook. Which is why, to misquote something Charlie Brooker once said (which I can't remember well enough to find it on Google), when something funny on the internet gets shown on TV, it stops being funny. "The Blogosphere" was all about that kind of connection; the personal connection that you get from reading something someone has written, which you've only discovered because the author has linked to something that you've blogged about yourself.

The next stage of blogging was where the "anyone can do it" mentality took the next logical stage; the corporate blog. "Do it yourself" publishing turned into cheap PR, where the CEO (or rather, his secretary) would blog about the great work that their company was doing. Blogs had moved from fanzines to press releases. It wasn't about discovering a new means of self-expression; it was about a cheap form of distribution.

Now, we're in the third stage. As internet usage has grown, there are more people out there reading blogs, meaning that there are opportunities for advertisers to reach their audiences. As a result, blogs have moved with the money; not just corporate publishers looking for a new way to cheaply reach a new audience, but for bloggers to find new ways of reaching advertising. From the early days where bloggers would write their posts to include the kinds of keywords that advertisers were bidding most on in Google Ads, to the stage where blogs got big enough to command direct deals with advertisers. Audiences have got bigger, and as a result, the bigger blogs work more like media organisations than home publishers. Indeed, virtually every major media outlet now runs blogs and updates them faster than any individual blogger ever could. Right now, pretty much every professional blog out there is either commenting on the role that bloggers have played in the US election, or on the media-savvy electioneering that won Obama the most powerful political role on the planet.

Like the explosion and burning out of punk rock, the death of the blogosphere was inevitable. But the spirit of punk rock, of "doing it yourself" has definitely carried on in other forms; every garage band, bedroom DJ, techno producer and hip hop artist has been trying to break through and do something new with sound and music, not emulating their heroes but trying to break new ground.

As I said in my "what is blogging?" post, it's not about "the Blogosphere." It died; not because it wasn't big enough to sustain itself, but because it got too big. Too many people, too much money, too many people interested in things other than their own personal expression. So now, it's fragmented; Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, podcasts, vodcasts, "Have Your Say", "Speak You're Branes"- and hundreds, if not thousands of other channels where people are going somewhere to express themselves, and in doing so, coming together and exchanging thoughts, bouncing ideas and information off one another. Instead of the blogosphere, we have the makings of the Social Web. It's not just virtual conversations on the internet anymore; now it's real life.

Earlier this year, Jason Calacanis announced his retirement from blogging. Rather than public blogging, he announced that he would be sharing his thoughts with an email list; his chosen way of paring down to a smaller, limited group of people so that he could listen, as well as speak. For him, the Blogosphere is clearly dead.

Money definitely has a part in it; the amount of spam that blogs receive astounds me- even though I've never really worked on promoting my own websites (I'm more interested in who reads my writing than how many people read it), I've still had thousands of spam comments. So I can completely understand why Calacanis retired; I can't even find the time to check through all those to make sure that they are all spam- the mere idea of following the number of genuine comments and trackbacks that his posts must have received fills me with terror- let alone worrying about the money that puts your food on the table relying on your writing and posting often enough and interesting enough pieces to keep both your audience and advertisers happy just doesn't sound like fun.

So, the blogosphere is dead. But in it's place, we have it's offspring; communications networks like Facebook, instant messaging, sideblogging and liveblogging. There's new ways of using the networks; crowdsourcing, open source philosophies, "wikinomics." And there's more content, news and opinions, freely available from all over the world; the kind of network of information or "invisible college" that's been dreamt of since the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, and in the space of the last decade has become a reality. Without a doubt, blogging, if not bloggers, have changed the world.

As for me and this site, I'll stick to my garage band, independent self-publishing style of blogging. After all, it has already got me my "major label deal"- I get to do a job that means do what I enjoy; learning and talking about something I find interesting.

What more could you ask for?