Has Blog Reading Gone Mainstream?
Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and well known blogger, today wonders if blog reading has gone mainstream.
I think it is clear from a quick review of these numbers that blog reading is a mainstream and a mass medium. And the companies that serve this market, both bloggers and blog readers, are in a very interesting position.
… The thesis that blogs were a new form of publishing and self expression is playing out nicely and we are pleased with the progress of our companies and the market as a whole. And I think we are not anywhere near the end game.
Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures is backer of several blogging (related) companies such as Tumblr, Twitter, Disqus and Zemanta.
Living the tech related bubble many bloggers belong to, we often tend to forget that not everyone does blog or has the need to share their opinions on everything online. I recently had the opportunity to once more guest-lecture about blogging at UCLan. Out of almost 200 Computer Science first year students only one said to read blogs (to follow music bands). When I mentioned other popular blogs like Techcrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget and Kotaku lights went up and a majority admitted reading blogs.
As far as I am concerned the time to ditch the term ‘blogs’ has come, especially when it comes to most popular multi-authored ‘blogs’. Most of these publications are online magazines. Everyone ‘blogs’, whether it are tech publications like Techcrunch and Gizmodo or the news stream of popular sites like Neowin or Facebook notes and status updates. Many online versions of main stream media long have (additionally) endorsed the ‘blogging platform’ for their editors, authors. Last but not least, many people read blogs, often without knowing that they are reading ‘blogs’.
Like Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of MyBlogLog) says in the comments on Fred Wilson’s post:
It’s about content, not the wrapper.
