“Is Blogging Dead?” The topic at hand at the Small Press Center’s (see post on main page) annual book fair. The question is posed whether or not blogging is losing its sexiness.

Now I never thought it was sexy in the first place. I always thought of it as an anomaly at best, but maybe the idea of sexiness comes from the fact that not everyone knows about it yet (hard to believe) and to many who do know of it, they don’t understand.

Well, this is as good a place as any to discuss this. What do you think? 

“Has blogging lost its sexy edge?”

We were sexy? I think I missed that part of the whole blogging thing. I thought we were a bunch of pathetic nerds in their basements compensating for their social awkwardness. I wish someone would have let me know when we were sexy.

So basically: Typing is sexy? (But not any more?)

As someone who just started blogging I hope it isn’t dead! I think it has just kind of changed, maybe morphed from a bunch of people in their basements (ha!) to people who are actively looking for information that they can’t find elsewhere - I’m not looking for a community per se (I still like to know people on a face to face basis and speak to them on occasion!), but I am looking for more info in my fields of interest and exchanging ideas with folks who like what I like. I think the whole ED Sci Fi Project is an example of the excellence of blogging - get folks involved fast and easy and manage to show some authors how much their work is appreciated. Very cool.

My question is what is normal activity for a blog. How many visitors should you have at first - what do you do to spread the word about your blog, that kinda thing. And maybe what makes some blogs more relevant than others.

Those are good questions Colleen. I don’t know if there is a normal, particularly since the blogosphere is growing exponentially.

I don’t think blogging is dead, but because of the way the net works, it sure is evolving rapidly. The biggest force is money of course and professional in media and other fields jumping in. I think those last questions questions are excellent things to post here in the forums.

I reckon this blogger was very sexy…

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1031817,00.html

Asking whether blogging is dead is like asking if the novel is dead.  The answer to both questions is “no, but they aren’t like they were in our fathers’ time”.

I see blogs as the next evolutionary step from apazines: small fanzines (sometimes not so small) that were circulated in an “Amateur Press Association” or apa.  These apas circulated a collated stock of fanzines, from apa members, once a month or bi-monthly or quarterly.  Subsequent mailings contained other members’ responses to those fanzines.  Blogs have speeded up the circulation and reduced response times but the concept is pretty much the same.

And novels?  Well, let’s not go there shall we?  We’ll be here all day.  I keep on finding good stuff to read and they are called novels in the bookshop, so that’ll do me.

I came across the first e-journal on blogging today and have stuck it on my other weblog - it’s called Into the Blogosphere and is a cross between an e-prints repository and a journal with its home at the University of Minnesota. Find it here : http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
If blogging is dead, someone had better let all the universities, journalists, techies, public relations consultants, mommy bloggers and educators know fast!

In a section of a book proposal, I wrote a chapter that reimagines events described in Jon Harr’s A Civil Action. The basic elements are familiar, an isolated group of people victimized by corporate irresponsibility. Newspapers failed to cover the story, and the legal system’s grinding process favored those with resources. I’m not suggesting that blogging would have altered the course of events in that case, but if bloggers had existed in significant numbers, the leverage game would have been altered. Hell, it has been altered. The threat of job loss, economic retaliation, legal maneuvering frightens newspapers, cows television stations, but not bloggers. This simple shift allows a million blossoms to bloom to paraphrase Mao. Blogging is not dead, it has just begun the perilous journey into adolescence.

When I compared the question of “Is blogging dead?” to “Is the novel dead?”, I didn’t want to open a big can of worms I just wanted to make a standard comparison.  I think both questions are silly.

I think blogging is still in its infancy.  We’ve only just started and I’m finding new things about the medium practically every day.  Long may it run.

Guy Rundle of Arena magazine (Australia) has recently described bloggers as ‘atomised’ in a contribution he made to a recent Melbourne publication, Barons to Bloggers. He was discussing blogging in the context of concentrated media ownership and the increasing reluctance of the large middle class to be politically active. The point can be generalised to every niche area that is being nurtured by the practice of blogging - the question of audience is relevant to us all. There was a point not so long ago where litbloggers would announce a new blog in words like, “wow, there seem to be dozens of us now’ and there was a nagging sense of loss attached to the remark. Some of these niche areas are cosier than others - the PR industry, for example, was quick to use the software for conferences, whereas I think litbloggers vary in their opinions over what social software is useful for. Metaxucafe has opened new horizons, for example, for independent publishers to publicise their new titles.