Newscoma

Kirk Varner breaks things down in this post-election haze.

My favorite read of the morning was an article by Techno-pundit Nicholas Carr who has postulated on the provocative headline “Who killed the Blogosphere?” Mr. Carr documents the shift away from the collective blogging of an army of dedicated private citizens to the success of the elite professional magazine-types, turned commercial blog-based media that now dominate the lists of sites that keep such lists, like the oft-quoted Technorati. You know, the Huffington Posts, Engadgets, and Boing Boings of the world.

Carr goes on to compare the short lifespan arc of blogging to that of the still surviving arc of amateur radio. While I can agree on some similarities between the two, I think the analysis of what has happened to each since its nascent success early on is flawed. Carr and a subsequent poster suggest that Amateur radio has all but died because of licensing and equipment costs. Nothing could be further from the truth, the equipment is cheaper than its ever been for amateur radio and blogging. Licensing for “ham radio” operators is far easier than it was when I was a kid and unsuccessfully struggled to learn even a tiny bit of morse code.

No, I would suggest that Blogging and amateur radio have actually been dealing with the same social challenge. Those who got in at the start, thinking that their own stream of programming would attract large audiences of others have realized (for the most part) that it wasn’t going to happen. What is left are the people who find the art of casting forth a transmission of their own to be interesting enough, and worth doing whether there is one million or just one recipient.

And that brings us back to the question of hope. It is a very personal emotion, different for each of us. We hope for things based on our situation, whether than be a shared one with the national psyche or an individual one based on our own fates and fortunes.

Blogging is a personal emotion and expression and Varner hits it on the head. But the commercialization of the genre is necessary on many angles but it isn’t the end all be all. Blogging is what it is.

There is art to this hobby though. There are transcendent moments where good citizen journalism and artistic expression be it visual or the written word can be found in the most minute of places. If commercial blog-based media joins hands with amateur blogging, then it can work in a community environment. It’s one reason I advocate community-based blogs from mainstream media. If an incestuous environment of just linking to other large based commercial media becomes the practice, the venture doesn’t work.

We are in a changing environment regarding the place of blogs in the very near future.

I can’t help but wonder what will happen.

And what Jack Lail said.