BLOGGING IS DEAD? ACCORDING TO WHOM?
As a blogger, the last three years have been interesting ones, to say the least. — 2005 was the year blogs came of age. For a lot of people around me at the time, the key moment was when Businessweek's now-legendary article, "Blogging Will Change Your Business" made the front cover.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post sits at the tail end of a three-year arc that began when [[a:1000000-placeholder-not-used]]—no. Businessweek put "Blogging Will Change Your Business" on its front cover in 2005, the moment the author marks as blogs coming of age, and by January 2006 AdAge was already deflating the category with the argument that a blogger is just a writer with a cooler name. By late 2007 the pendulum had swung from transformation hype to obituary, with "blogging is dead" claims circulating widely enough that GapingVoid devoted a post to disputing them.
First-order effects
- Businesses and marketers that built blog strategies on the strength of Businessweek's 2005 front-cover endorsement are the audience for both the decline narratives and GapingVoid's rebuttal, so the dispute lands squarely in their content-budget deliberations.
- The author's open challenge — according to whom? — targets the unnamed sources behind the obituary coverage, forcing anyone repeating the death claim to defend it rather than treat it as consensus.
Second-order effects
- If decline coverage sticks, early corporate-blog adopters will tend to redirect attention toward whatever format the business press crowns next, extending the hype-to-obituary cycle that began with the same magazine's cover story rather than evaluating the practice on its own results.
- The AdAge-style reframing of bloggers as simply writers pressures advertising and media buyers to price the activity by output and audience rather than by platform label.
Third-order effects
- The structural question underneath GapingVoid's pushback is whether a medium is defined by its label or its behavior — if the pattern holds, 'blogging' as a category fades into ordinary frequent publishing while the practice itself persists under new names.
- Sustained boom-and-bust framing by mainstream business media risks making adoption decisions follow editorial cycles instead of utility, an incentive problem for any format the press alternately anoints and buries.
The trend: Business-media coverage of blogging is cycling from 2005's transformation hype toward 2007's obituaries, and the lasting contest is between the medium's label and the publishing behavior it named.