A couple of weeks ago Wired magazine featured one of the “founding fathers of blogging”, Jason Calacanis, who claimed blogs are dead. He said he had posted his last post. Reasons being, spam, as well as lack of interest among everyone except large corporate sites. Other reasons related to SEO, which had been a key reason for the attractiveness of blogs to spammers. Apparently in response to the blog spam issue Google is dialing down the importance of blogs in their ranking formula.
Recently the spam issue had grown increasingly worse even on this blog, to the point where I had stopped allowing comments. And I was in fact considering ending the ‘experiment’ which I had originally started a few months ago to understand blogging from the bloggers POV (Anderson Analytics conducts text mining including blog minining).
After reading the article I asked bloggers on LinkedIn what they thought. Were blogs on their way out? If so, what about “blog mining” companies? I was glad Anderson Analytics has always focused our text mining on a wider variety of sources. We have been data source agnostic if you will.
However, as you might expect several bloggers disagreed with Wired’s gloomy prediction. They also suggested various spam blocking software, some of which we’ve just upgraded this blog with. So you can now once again post comments if you like (though they will be reviewed first).
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In conclusion, this blog and others are not quite dead yet. More importantly, this Monday Anderson Analytics will be releasing partial findings from our longitudinal work with GenX2Z college students. This data shows an increase of Consumer Generated Media (CGM), especially blogging among college students. College women are driving this trend, as they are over three times more likely than college men to blog! Stay tuned for a more detailed look at this trend next week.
Until then, feel free to post a comment if you like
-Tom
Link to original postTom H. C. Anderson – Anderson Analytics
