My wife rightfully chided me the other night for a junior high school habit of issuing a loud yell of “bulls***” at the same time I sneeze.
I have almost the same reaction when I read cruft like “Free Website Content – The Future of RSS is Not Blogs”– the claim being the majority, the writer suggests, only. use of RSS in the future is not what made it publisher, feeds published by blogs, but by “businesses using RSS as a communication vehicle are able to create keyword-rich, themed content, establishing trust, reputation, and ongoing communication with current and prospective customers.”
I feel a sneeze coming on…
Like the Internet when it first started, blogs were emboldened by the “cool factor”. As the novelty of being new and cool wears off, Internet webmasters and bloggers alike are realizing that maintaining a website or blog is time-consuming. “Coolness” often wears off if a channel is not monetized. With the ease of blogging and the array of blogs available, only a handful will be able to sustain fresh, constant, unique content and generate any sort of reasonable or significant revenue. As a result, blogs as we know them today will fade into the background, with many blogs being abandoned.
Such a grand sweeping generalization! Of course, many blogs will be abandoned. Does it also spell the end for citizen journalism? personalized web radio via podcasts? student publishing a la eportfolios? Travel-blogs? Heck, do you think the teen diarists are getting tired of blogging? Does the writer really think all of what they label as “consumer driven” is just more tips for cheaper digital cameras and discount airline tickets? Do these monetizing morons really miss the power of blogs in providing personal publishing? Do they miss the Read/Write Web?
I am a nobody if I am not “monetizing my channel”?
My nostrils are twitching… I feel… a… large … sneeze … coming… B…B… Bullshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Yeah. I get the same gut-wrenching revulsion building up everything I hear the “M” word. Like something has no value unless you can squeeze cold, hard cash out of it. You know, sometimes the value is in the stuff that goes on _around_ the thing, rather than in the thing itself…
I once considered “monetizing” one of my blogs just for the novelty of it (not expecting to make more than a nickle off of it in any given year) but then decided that I’d rather not muddy the waters of my own writing by making it look like I have anything to gain (financially) from what I write.
In the end I have committed to never do that myself and also to rarely visit sites that do. Blogging for me is sharing ideas to improve them. Once my bank account gets involved there are too many forces at work that make my ideas look cheap and encourage me to cheapen my ideas in the in interest of getting rich (anything to make it more than $0.05 per year)