End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over
That's right. We're at the end of an important period. The tech blogosphere as we know it, is over. — Four Trends Show the End of this Era: — Like the film industry, the Golden Era is the emergence period, when fresh innovation in a new medium is born.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least the third round of the same obituary. Hugh MacLeod asked who gets to declare blogging dead back in December 2007, Nicholas Carr followed with an autopsy of the blogosphere in November 2008, and now Web Strategy closes out 2011 by declaring the golden age over — framing the blogosphere on a film-industry arc where the 'golden era' is always the scrappy emergence period before consolidation sets in.
What makes this installment notable is that the verdict drew an immediate public split: Sarah Lacy published a same-day rebuttal titled 'I Couldn't Disagree More,' turning one analyst's four-trend thesis into a live argument about whether independent tech voices are finished or merely changing form.
First-order effects
- Web Strategy's four-trend thesis puts independent tech bloggers on notice that the audience and economics of the 2000s-era personal blog are eroding, while Sarah Lacy's same-day rebuttal stakes out the counter-position that the era's best work is still ahead.
Second-order effects
- The disagreement forces other tech commentators to pick a side — either doubling down on owned blogs or following the argument's logic toward whatever distribution channel replaces the standalone site, making 'where do you publish' a strategic question rather than a default.
Third-order effects
- If the film-industry analogy holds, tech commentary structurally repeats its own history: each medium matures from amateur emergence to institutionalized production, and the recurring 'blogging is dead' piece — 2007, 2008, 2011 — becomes a genre marker of those transitions rather than a one-off prediction.
The trend: Tech commentary is cycling through periodic obituaries as publishing power migrates from independent blogs toward consolidated, professionalized channels, with each declaration contested by the independents it describes.