Jason Calacanis is was a top line blogger. An A-Lister.
And he announced his retirement from blogging because the pressure was too great. Specifically he cites:
- it lacks the intimacy that drew me to it
- Pressure – keeping the blog big and impersonal
- Vitriol – online trolls and 'haters'
But if this marks the end of the 'revolution' stage of blogging, ti certainly marks the move to the mainstream and the middle of the bell-curve. How companies get messages out to market has broadened and widened and Jason no longer feels 'special' and I, for one, am glad of it. The ease and ubiquity of blogging software, methods means that including it in business development strategy should be normal and deserves to be widespread.
Now lets get people reading / consuming blog content in the mobile space as well. Oh, you can still follow Jason on Twitter which, as a micro-blog, he is comfortably still on the leading edge and feels he can get the fame quotient without the pressures.
PS. I met Jason once.
[Since the Economist is a subscription only website, I haven't linked to the article, but reproduce it below in full.]
Oh, grow up
From The Economist print edition
Blogging is no longer what it was, because it has entered the mainstream
IN
THE anthropologically isolated subculture of elite bloggers, it was the
equivalent of a watershed, and certainly a tear-shed. With “a heavy
heart, and much consideration”, Jason Calacanis this summer announced
his “retirement from blogging”, which he believed was “the right
decision for me and my family”. Mr Calacanis, a founder of Weblogs, Inc.,
a blog network that he later sold to AOL, an internet portal, had been
a member of the “A-list”—those bloggers with the most incoming links
and the highest “authority” on blog-search engines such as Technorati.
With the bathos of Napoleon departing for Elba or Michael Jordan
bidding adieu to basketball, Mr Calacanis bowed out, reverting to the
ancient medium of e-mail to disseminate his opinions.
“Blogging is
simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to
it,” he offered by way of explanation. It was, he said, “the pressure”
of staying on the A-list—ie, of keeping his blog so big and
impersonal—that got him. Only a few years ago, so few people blogged
that being a blogosphere celebrity required little more than showing
up. Now it takes hard work. And vitriol. “Today the blogosphere is so
charged, so polarised, and so filled with haters hating that it’s
simply not worth it,” Mr Calacanis lamented.
The rest of
the world may well have missed the unfolding of his tragedy. Behind it,
however, is a bigger trend. Blogging has entered the mainstream,
which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers
suspiciously like death. To the earliest practitioners, over a decade
ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos
and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and
family members. Today lots of internet users do this, only they may not
think of it as blogging. Instead, they update their profile pages on
Facebook, MySpace or other social networks.
They may also “micro-blog” on services such as Twitter,
which recreate the raw, immediate and intimate feel of early blogs.
Twitter messages, usually sent from mobile phones, are fewer than 140
characters long and answer the question “What are you doing?”
Tellingly, Evan Williams, the co-founder of Blogger—an
early blogging service that is now owned by Google, the Wal-Mart of the
internet—now runs Twitter, which he regards as the future.
As for
traditional (if that is the word) blog pages, these tend increasingly
to belong to conventional media organisations. Nearly every newspaper,
radio and television channel now runs blogs and updates them faster
than any individual blogger ever could. Professional blogs such as HuffingtonPost.com for liberals (with 4.5m visitors in September) or FreeRepublic.com for conservatives (with 1m visitors in that month) have played a big role in America’s election season, according to comScore,
an online-measurement firm. These “new media” firms are now suffering
from the same advertising slowdown as their offline rivals. Gawker, a gossip-blog empire, has already begun laying off bloggers.
Simultaneously,
companies far outside the media industry have embraced blogging as just
another business tool. They are using blogs both to get corporate
messages to the public and as an internal medium for staff. Companies
like Six Apart, which provides Movable Type, TypePad and other blogging
tools, see firms as their most promising market.
Gone, in
other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is
revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of
its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful
and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management
system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows
comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may
“die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have
died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using
electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are
also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.
