The Jocks of The Blogosphere
Posted by Sam at 1:05 PM

There is an interesting article running over there at the Blog Herald, about the "The demise of the geek bloggers." It's definitely worth giving a read, but in an effort to feed the commentary here on sambot::blogging allow me to offer up (my interpretation of) the gist of the article:

Back in the day, when blogging was new to the scene, the technology had just recently been developed and not yet streamlined into the mass commodity that we see in mainstream culture today. The only bloggers that could effectively use the medium were the ones who understood the technology; the geeks. So logically, geeks were the ones who were blogging and of course, they were blogging about geek things. Now, with services like Blogger, and Live Journal, and the ten zillion others, blogging has hit a critical momentum point. The ease of use allows the non-geek to blog along side the best of 'em. And now that the non-geek is blogging, the blogs tend to have non-geek related themes.

Clearly, when mainstream culture absorbs anything, every aspect of it becomes mainstream and, by definition, becomes less unique. Blogs, once reveled as a niche thing, are now a mass commodity. And their topics that once dominated the culture have fallen to niche level. Really, it's an odd paradox.

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Sam,

I agree with your analysis, for proof to support your theroy look no further than the growing popularity of podcasts at Apple. This time a month ago all of the top ten podcasts were dedicated to geek subjects like computers and tech shows. Now if you look at the listings more mainstream channels such as ESPN are starting to surface but five of the top twenty slots are still held by ubergeeks.

Comment By TheDarkLordDerfla on September 07, 2005 11:45 AM