Has Blogging Peaked? | Big Think

Has Blogging Peaked?

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Anil Dash explains how the blogosphere has grown from a small, tight knit community to a pervasive engine of modern communication, and evaluates whether or not it’s a good thing for our culture.

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Anil Dash :

Anil Dash (born 1975) is a blogger, entrepreneur and technologist. He is currently the Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs and a partner at ACTIVATE, a media & technology consulting firm.

Previously an independent technology consultant, and a new media developer for the Village Voice, Dash was the first employee of Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, and served as its Vice President and Chief Evangelist until moving on to Expert Labs. In 2003, Dash was one of four bloggers featured on the PBS series Media Matters. He is also in demand as a speaker at such events as Northern Voice and the Web 2.0 Conference.

Dash's current role is directing Expert Labs, a non-profit, independent group with a mandate to help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government utilize the expertise of their fellow citizens.

Dash was born and grew up near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A long-time resident and vocal fan of New York City, he lived in San Francisco for a time but has now returned to New York City.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How has blogging changed since you started ten years ago?

Anil Dash:I think blogging has changed tremendously over the past decade. One, we didn’t really think of it consciously as something that would be quite so pervasive, quite so influential. So early on when I started reading blogs I felt like everybody in the community—a few dozen of us—read every other blog everyday.

That’s really hard to do when the other 100 million or so show up; you think, “Gosh, this is a little bit more than what we can read.” But there was a very, very strong sense of community, and what came from that was the same feeling I have being in this village here in New York, and where I live; saying, “I know who my neighbors are. Maybe I don’t know this person well, but their face is familiar to me”. The same way, their voice is familiar and so your norms for a community that size are really very thoughtful, very, very considerate.

Blogging today may has gotten a reputation as being a free for all [where] people can say anything, do anything. There are a lot of really unkind comments, because as newer sites came along, or newer bloggers came along, they hadn’t quite learned the lessons that you get after 5 years, 10 years of blogging—which are, you really want to make sure you have a human connection between the readers of your site, between you as a blogger and your readers. If you do these things, you can preserve the best elements of it. So, I think we’ve lost a little bit of the personal connection; certainly the biggest blogs have been the ones that define people’s perception to medium, and those are essentially just more broadcast or large-scale publishers like TV, radio and newspapers, where it is hard for them to keep a relationship with their readers.

Question: What is your take on the authenticity issues presented by blogs and new media?

Anil Dash:I think there’s a lot of a conversation where journalists say, “What do we do about the authenticity problem, how do we confront it?” I think the fact that I’m in the journalism world is described as a problem is very telling. The reality is humans are very well wired to evaluate the credibility of the source of their information all the time. We do it night and day. There was this pretense for a long time, when journalism was primarily a mass market endeavor, that you had to defend your credibility at all times and that nobody would know what your bias was if you sufficiently hid it. The thing is, we’ve always known. We’ve always been able to see through that, and so I think step one was acknowledging how much people wanted a real human voice—they will be their own judge as to whether there was a bias there, and what the background was. Then, the question of credibility comes up all the time.

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