There’s a lot of things we can complain about but the destruction of the blogosphere had a very specific individual cause. The death of Google Reader. Google R

There’s a lot of things we can complain about but the destruction of the blogosphere had a very specific individual cause. The death of Google Reader. Google Reader came onto the scene and essentially destroyed all incumbents. Even if you used an independent client, the syncing was almost certainly based on your Google Reader account. And Google Reader also provided a social discovery component which no one even tried competing with because how could you. The sudden death of Google Reader was followed by a glut of rushed alternatives, which meant no specific alternative could get sufficient acceptance. There were a lot of things that hurt the blogosphere but most of them would either have naturally withered away (for instance, the commercial crowd would almost certainly have migrated to social media), or could have been figured out (spam blogs could have easily been beaten if the likes of Google were interested). The death of Google Reader, which also happened to coincide with the rise of social media (not a coincidence since Google Reader was killed in order to promote Google’s social media offering), was something the blogosphere could not recover from.