Eventually, everything comes to an end. It is written even in the Bhagwad Gita. Is the blogosphere following this path and coming to an end? Has it run its full course? I cannot but muse about this lifecycle of blogging drawing to an end.
Blogs took birth not very far down the memory lane. It was welcomed whole-heartedly by the internet-enabled people of India and the rest of the world. The frenzy of activity in the blogosphere by the youth and businesses and journalists soon made headlines. Blogs were the in thing at that time. Everybody I knew was blogging feverishly- the discussion among people those days was about what the hot thing that the blogosphere is talking about and what will the next big discussion to be put on the altar. Youth blogging about move reviews and the general stuff of everyday lives- college events, breakups etc- the businesses leveraging the power of blogs to reach to the general public to sell their ideas and their brand. Blogging was everywhere.
The main purpose of blogging was to give people the power to fulfill their right to expression. People always had the right to expression but blogging took it to the next level by bringing the whole world together. Now one's views were not only heeded by one's friends' circle but by the whole world- at least by the whole internet fraternity. This power was too much for the common man and he was in no way going to let the opportunity slip. Thus the blogosphere.
Then suddenly some genius who was not in the mood of typing so much for getting his views aired came up with the idea of microblogging. This is where blogging lost out. Strangely, people appreciated this idea of less typing and getting ideas across in tweets which comes packaged with the slaughter of the English language- well there are always side-effects. But the thought that microblogging will almost completely outstrip blogging, and that too this soon, was not something that was not anticipated.
While many would argue that blogging still holds reign, the fact remains that blogging has lost. Remnants remain and journalists still publish blogs on news websites because they don't make it to the print edition but the new age is that of microblogging. Movie stars, businesses, youth and Shashi Tharoor now-a-days tweet. If we have a look at blogs now-a-days, they have become shorter and shorter which is coming to resemble more to microblogging on a blog- a hybrid.
Will the blogging community completely die someday? And will it be a natural death or will it be because of external factors? Something to ponder upon- the similarities between blogging dying due to microblogging (an external event) and the extinction of rain forests due to climate change (again an external event). Ironically, the external agent in the both the cases is the same.
