大象传媒

Blogging about blogging

• Kate Feld
• 28 Mar 07, 04:32 PM

What do bloggers love to write about more than anything else? Blogging. Yep, blogging about blogging. How meta can you get, right? And Mancunian bloggers are no different, so it's no surprise that a few of them wrote responses to suggesting that blogging is in decline.

Norman Geras of agrees that the blogging frenzy has lost a little of its momentum:

鈥淪ome of the earlier enthusiasm of both bloggers and readers of blogs seems to have cooled; several debates that occupied the political blogosphere have been gone over so many ways there's less life in them now, even if they haven't fully run their course; the very abundance of online comment may well discourage potential participants by suggesting that their voices are lost in the crowd.

, however, believes that online readers have developed higher standards for blogs, producing not a decline but an evolution, as less-than-fascinating sites are weeded out. He writes:

鈥淭oday, there is much more professionalisation of blogging 鈥� people earning their money through writing blogs. These sites attract large readerships and leave smaller, more personal sites looking inferior. People have got wise to what bad blogs are, and they don't read them any more. This isn't such a bad thing, I think. We have complex sites for ranking, indexing, and finding information, so there is less incentive to "surf" the net as we used to 鈥� we can go straight to information hubs and find what we're looking for much more easily now.鈥�

鈥淚n other words, I suggest there has been a shift over the last ten years, that the blogosphere has established for itself a set of aesthetics, or a standard by which to judge the quality of content. Inevitably, this will result in the falling-away of a large number of bad and poorly maintained blogs (this one, one day, you may pray), but this is surely no bad thing.鈥�

One area where blogging definitely seems to be in no danger of decline is among students 鈥� new student blogs seem to be cropping up in Manchester all the time. Want to read 鈥榚m? Blogger may be able to help:

鈥淎 couple of years ago I bought the domain name studentblogs.co.uk with the intent of creating a aggregator for Manchester students鈥he domain has sat there gathering dust, so I thought I鈥檇 finally put it to use and aggregate some of my friends blogs. An aggregator basically compiles the blog posts from loads of blogs into one pages, making it easier to keep up to date with what everybody is doing.鈥�

Readers or Manchester student bloggers who want to be added should head to The current blogroll includes , , , .

Since I鈥檝e been called away to the states, James of has kindly picked up the slack in organizing the Manchester spring blogmeet. He鈥檚 calling for a gathering of the blogging clans at the Hare and Hounds on Shudehill at 3pm on Saturday April 7. As usual, all are welcome鈥� seasoned bloggers, novices and blog enthusiasts of all kinds.