Venkatesh Rao, while retiring the Ribbonfarm blog, makes a serious prediction:
I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era. And what has emerged to take its place is not the blogosphere (and really shouldn’t try to be), even though parts of it have tried to claim the word.
I don’t think there is any single heir to the blog, or to the public social media landscape it dominated, anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire when it collapsed. And this is as things should be. Emerging media should emerge into their own identities, not attempt to perpetuate the legacies of sundowning media, or fight over baggage. And of course, many architectural elements of the blog will live on in newer media, just as many patterns we live with today originated in the Roman empire. Chronological feeds, and RSS-like protocols are part of our collective technological vocabulary. So at least in a technological sense, nothing is dying per se. But in a cultural sense, we are definitely witnessing the end of an era.
A few people beg to differ, of course, but there is a generational gap here and my kids may be viewing blogs the same way I saw Bulletin Board Systems, and note that some of those are still around! But maybe not; this post’s main home is, after all, on a blog. Which yesterday had 3 orders of magnitude fewer visitors than a single social media post (about which I will write more soon here, not on X). So it goes…