No, really, I’m just anticipating the events. Someday, somewhere, a big blog will suddenly crash, and some ‘smart’ dude will say: “this day the blogosphere died”. Though blogs will still continue to exist, whatever one meant for “blogsphere” won’t be there anymore.
But then, what if it had happened already? Three years ago, when I thought “blogosphere” I thought, because it was that way, about a decentralized heavily interlinked community of self-aware individuals —and sorry for the IT slang. Did something change radically either on concept or scale in these last three years?
Yes. Advertising. And blogs as low quality-high spread commercial platforms.
Advertising networks, and therefore the Search Engine Circus competition, has moved the network from the blog-to-blog sphere to the blog-to-ads-network sphere, and replaced the core of the interlinking from the «lets form a super-cool bloggers microsphere» to «lets form a cartel to powergame the Google-slot machine». But the worst part of the link-rush fever, as always, is being paid by the small mimicking guys lured by the big promises. The once natural and balanced ecosystem of blog links is now spammed to death by the massive creation of artificial relations between blogs. You don’t know anymore if something is being referred because it’s worth it, or because the blogger wants to place some keywords, or is being paid for linking —which is not evil by itself—, and pretending that it is his sincere personal tastes —which is blatantly shameless. And we cannot forget, too, that the bulk of the chatty-sociable people has moved away of regular blogs to the meat-market of look-at-me web profiles, so they are not greasing anymore the interstices of the read-what-I-think sphere.
So, is the blogosphere of the old good days dead already? Do we bloggers live in tiny islands in the after global-web-warming apocalypse? Or is that still waiting to happen?
