The Snake Eats Its Tail

Blogging, like any other media genre, is subject to imploding under its own weight. New media or new mediums have this half-life in which they're born, are fresh for a while and then slowly become everything they claimed to be different from. This has been happening for decades: print journo, radio, television, satellite radio, the Internet.

I think I'm starting to see the beginnings of such (or maybe I'm just catching on) when I see entries like this one over at Scobleizer. Blogging about blogging (he references this page) reminds me of that Louis Black routine on 'the end of the universe':


It's sad to think that people can be both the early-adopter and the early-killer of the same technology. To be an early adopter requires courage and vision. To be an early-killer, you just have to lose courage and vision. The whole idea behind writing is that you have something to talk about. Just so we're all clear: blogging about blogging is not. At least, not if you're a place where people go to hear about things besides blogging. Blogging isn't a fad (unlike Twitter...I'm saying it's a fad - sue me!) but it's still susceptible to irrelevance, just like every other media. I can't say right now that this is something I'll never be guilty of or have never been guilty of - I'm just saying that if this is a medium to be taken seriously, it needs to be serious about what it wants to accomplish.

Especially if it happens to be your day job.