The Chicago Tribune publicó el miércoles un editorial sobre el futuro de los blogs que plantea un panorama bastate negativo.
Resulta revelador que lo vean así en Estados Unidos, que nos lleva bastante delantera, a no ser que se trate de un ‘deseo’ de los responsables de la edición en papel.
Bloggy, we hardly knew ye
Published February 22, 2006 (traducir al español con Google)
No sooner had Al Gore invented the Internet than early adopters discovered a liberating opportunity: Anybody with a modem and an ego could share his or her thoughts with the world.
Remember what happened next? By the mid-1990s, a few self-publishers were sharing with tiny audiences links to Web sites they found interesting. In time, these hardy pioneers began adding commentaries–often insightful, usually irreverent–to their lists of links. In short, smart people were posting virtual logs of their interests and thoughts. In December 1997, the term «Web log» surfaced. In short order, we had the inevitable contraction: «blog.»
After that, the deluge. Today there are 20 million blogs worldwide, a number that grows by thousands daily. The ones that matter most, of course, have gobs of readers–with enough eyeballs to attract investors and advertisers.
But will everyone live happily ever after?
You’re forgiven if you cling to the conventional wisdom that blogging, like half-pipe snowboarding, enjoys an unrelievedly rich future. Forgiven, but maybe behind the curve. A new report from Gallup pollsters, «Blog Readership Bogged Down,» cautions that «the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year.»
Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs. Those numbers, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, put blog-reading dead last among Gallup’s measures of 13 common Internet activities. E-mailing ranks first (with 87 percent of users doing so frequently or occasionally), followed by checking news and weather (72), shopping (52) and making travel plans (also 52). Gallup concludes that while the amount of time people spend online has risen, «it appears the online public is simply doing more of the same activities, rather than branching out and trying different Internet offerings.»
The pixels hadn’t faded on Gallup’s downbeat report when Slate.com columnist Daniel Grossman chimed in with another requiem, «Twilight of the Blogs.» Grossman says: «There are troubling signs–akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble–that suggest blogs have just hit their top.» Among those signs: too much corporate money trying to buy into what could be a fad (including Time Warner paying a reported $25 million for Weblogs Inc.). Is too much money chasing not enough revenue? As Grossman aptly notes: «In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in.»
Even if blogging flops as a business and doesn’t attract more readership, many bloggers will still have loyal followings. Gallup’s report gives a nod to the chattering class–that segment of inordinately dialed-in Americans who are enthralled with, or at least entertained by, one another’s opinions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. «[M]any bloggers will argue that the influence of blogs is immeasurably greater than their readership statistics would suggest,» Gallup says, «because of the disproportionate influence they have on opinion leaders, political insiders and modern news media.»
So blogging has a future, however indefinite. At least till Al Gore invents the Next Big Thing.
