Rumors of blogging’s death

[I]n June 2005, Hauslaib packed his bags and moved to a sparsely furnished sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village, where he parked his massive Dell laptop on his kitchenette counter, installed a flat-screen LCD TV to catch breaking celebrity news, and began working on Jossip in earnest. He’d start each day at dawn, trolling the Web for dirt about celebrities and media stars. (“You gotta have something posted before people get to work,” he explains, “because my audience is people who hate their jobs.”) By the end of the year, Hauslaib’s site was steaming along nicely. He had almost everything Gawker had: He stalked the same celebrities, posted with the same speed and frequency, and wrote prose in the Spiers vernacular.

The only thing he didn’t have was Gawker’s audience. About 30,000 visitors a day, Jossip’s traffic is a mere 15 percent of Gawker’s. Hauslaib was generating a “comfortable five-figure income,” but certainly not millions. He’d hit a glass ceiling, in a medium where there weren’t supposed to be any limits.

Now, I don’t mean to pass judgment on Jossip -- I’m not familiar enough with the site to know how accurate Thompson’s description is, of Jossip as basically a direct imitation of Gawker. But whether it’s true or not, Thompson seems to think it is, and -- this is where is gets bizarre -- seems to think that imitating a popular site should be enough to make you one of the cool kids.

Thompson doesn’t seem to understand that in such a crowded entertainment arena, the only hope a writer has of standing out is not to imitate but to innovate, to give surfers something they’re not going to find somewhere else. Thompson also doesn’t seem to understand that, Holy crap, 30,000 visitors and day and a comfortable five-figure income from blogging is kick ass.

Fry again, in WSJ:

Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution. My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely -- and sometimes inaccurately -- to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening: One of the chief problems with some chronicles of blogging's demise is their confusion about definitions, a confusion that's mirrored in efforts to measure blogs' popularity or to say anything that can apply to bloggers as a group.

...

Wikis aside, today's Web looks very little like Tim Berners-Lee's original idea for a kind of digital whiteboard. Blogging is easier, faster and more conversational than traditional Web publishing, but that doesn't change the fact that relatively few people actually yearn to be publishers. Nor do they particularly care what category the things they read fit into, or what technological tools produced them. That may not sound like the stuff of revolution or VC riches, but it also doesn't sound like a fad or a failure.

What blogging really needs is genuine voice with something real to say. Says Trevor Butterworth in The Financial Times:

Much as the outpouring of humour in New York in the 1920s that gave rise to the Algonquin Round Table was a temporary post-traumatic cultural reaction to the shock of the Great War, the Gawker spirit is wearing a little thin in light of a seemingly endless bloody insurgency in Iraq, a mesmerising failure of government to deal with the massive catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, and revelations of corruption on Capitol Hill. “Satire,” said Choire Sicha, “is the most useless cultural effluvia one could possibly produce out of the cultural situation in America right now.”

...

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

The pace of blogging might preclude Great Writing from every pouring forth from a blog... but then again, it might not. Maybe the Net is about to spawn a writer who can be insightful and important and literary and fast.

From Bernard-Henri Levy in The Nation:

Everywhere, in the innermost reaches of America, you can meet men and women who hope for great voices capable of echoing their impatience in a momentous way. If I were an American writer, I would try to ponder the lessons of the totalitarian century and those of democracy, Tocqueville-style, all at once, in the same breath, and with the same rigor.

The first blogger who can tap into that will be the first one we remember.