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I totally agree, as I mentioned earlier tools like Digg/Reddit/HN are extremely important and beneficial for the "little guys" as it's an equalizer. Digg traffi

I totally agree, as I mentioned earlier tools like Digg/Reddit/HN are extremely important and beneficial for the "little guys" as it's an equalizer. Digg traffic are massive (about 350k pv worth depending on the interest), Reddit is pretty substantial (100k pv easily, again depending on interest). So for your question: exactly, is the commodification of blogs to form major media businesses a bad thing for small guys? Again, I'm not sure, yet. In the mainstream media world consolidation is a bad thing. In fact they fret about this commodification constantly as real journalists see it as an extremely bad thing. Dan Rather now heavily criticizes this about news agencies merging into just 3 or 4 major corporation worldwide http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o25T0BspJ7c http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o25T0BspJ7c. But then this opens yet whole other can of worms as mainstream media has a different type of burden: that of performing their duty as the fourth estate. So to sum up: the trend started with people making tools for regular people to write and express and create content easier. Those "blogs" are now turning into professional media empires, hogging up attention and pageviews. For the rest of the blogosphere to exist it needs to heavily depend on tools like Digg/Reddit to filter. Is blogging dead? Maybe. It's too early to tell. I really should just stop being lazy and extend my comments on here into blog posts. Maybe I'll get a social media consultant job out of it.

unalone 18y ago
I don't think blogging will ever die. It's extremely personal at its core, and there will always be small communities of bloggers writing only for themselves and the small community. (I'm a big Tumblr user, and I love having a network of about a hundred people with whom to interact. It gives me an audience and a feed of things I find interesting.) Everything becomes "professional" eventually. But that doesn't necessarily kill off the amateur audience. And on the Internet, there's a MUCH wider scope than there is on TV. News agencies were local. Even small personal blogs are technically global. It means there's more fragmentation. Things like trackbacks help with that (I wrote an article criticizing a start-up, once, and the founder found my post through that link directly), though they're ugly and not universal (Tumblr doesn't support them, for instance). I'd like a more powerful system: that might be an interesting start-up idea, actually, figuring out how to broaden the perspective of the blogosphere.

unalone 18y ago

I don't think blogging will ever die. It's extremely personal at its core, and there will always be small communities of bloggers writing only for themselves and the small community. (I'm a big Tumblr user, and I love having a network of about a hundred people with whom to interact. It gives me an audience and a feed of things I find interesting.) Everything becomes "professional" eventually. But that doesn't necessarily kill off the amateur audience. And on the Internet, there's a MUCH wider scope than there is on TV. News agencies were local. Even small personal blogs are technically global. It means there's more fragmentation. Things like trackbacks help with that (I wrote an article criticizing a start-up, once, and the founder found my post through that link directly), though they're ugly and not universal (Tumblr doesn't support them, for instance). I'd like a more powerful system: that might be an interesting start-up idea, actually, figuring out how to broaden the perspective of the blogosphere.