Famed SF/syberpunk pioneer Bruce Sterling is bearish on blogging, giving the fad 10 years in a speech at SXSW:
“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.
Nobody there heard a word he said. They were all on Twitter telling their friends where they were at the moment, too busy to notice the speech.
And he might be partially right — I wouldn’t be surprised to see a decline in the overall number of blogs. But I don’t think they’re going to crash and burn like he’s thinking.
Of course, blogs will only go away after The Next Big Communication Tool comes along. And I think ten years is plenty of time to discover that.
In 10 years we will be enjoying the Fonzie renaissance and having speeches by science fiction authors beamed directly into our head via microwaves, with optional commentary by the disembodied brains of ex-bloggers.
Blogs have jumped the shark alot lately:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:_OYs3SJAyGUJ:www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/16867698.htm+%22million+abandoned+blogs%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=ca