It wasn’t hype, just excitement

I’m always annoyed at statements like blogs have never completely lived up to their early hype as written in an otherwise good opinion piece about blogging in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by Sam Roggeveen, editor of the Lowy Institute blog.

I’ve been blogging and following everything that is the blogosphere for 5 years. So I read with interest the posts and articles during the phenomenal growth period when blogging started to take off. To me, the overall feeling towards blogs by bloggers in the early days was nothing but excitement at observing this personal publishing platform be embraced so quickly and passionately by so many.

I really don’t think there was ever an exaggerated publicity to pump up blogging to be something it was not. This is shown when a Google search of “blogs will replace newspapers” brings up a lame 17 results and when “bloggers will replace journalists” displays an even more a pitiful 11 results. I’ve always felt the hype surrounding blogging of what blogs could do was nothing more than a overly defensive myth perpetuated by those outside of the blogosphere.

While the exciting concepts of organised citizen journalism initiatives and problogging that Roggeveen mentions as evidence of blogging’s failure are both still growing in Australia. I think these are a poor basis to judge blogging’s success.

Like I said, Overhyped, but blogs are here to stay is worth a read but it is a shame that the writer felt he had to disparage blogging before getting down to worthwhile commentary about how blogs have evolved into a useful tool for the political process.