Dewey Defeats Truman

The Chicago Tribune joins a number of folks declaring the end of blogging as a phenomenon. This falling dead on the heels of Web 2.0. Thank goodness; it’s about time. Time to move on to The Next Big Thing.

What? You don’t trust the Trib to correctly call the game?

In an editorial titled Bloggy, we hardly knew ye, they argue that blogs are only read by 9% of Internet users. Email (87%) and making travel arrangements (52%) far outstrip it. This really mucks up all those predictions that blog-reading would replace travel planning and emailing. I’m shocked that a phenomenon that, at a broad level, has been around for a couple of years has only captured 9% of net users.

To be fair, the reason they think the shark is below us is that the 9% appears to be flat. Of course Desperate Housewives is watched by a smaller number, but it’s not dead yet. The Tribune itself has a readership much, much smaller than that, and shrinking. Heck, newspaper readership has a three-decade downward readership trend. Maybe they should turn their gaze a bit closer to home.

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2 Comments

  1. Posted 2/27/2006 at 9:53 pm | Permalink

    thank god! now we can get back to work. it was a PITA when they let the binnises on the internet in 1995, so maybe we can declare that whole experiment overwith and they can go home?

    but seriously, it sounds like the more of the broadcast hegemony failing to muscle in on polycastual anarchy, and we’re too busy gossiping with each other to notice.

  2. Posted 3/24/2006 at 5:25 pm | Permalink

    They make a point that bloggers and Web 2.0 hypers fail to realize — that only a few people actually care about the “cutting edge” of the Internet. That minority shouts so loud that they don’t hear the muttering of the unwashed masses.

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