“Which brings us to today—I can’t help wonder if blogging is following this same trend. Inevitably, millions of voices will grow quiet as the novelty wears off.”
This seems to me to be one of those discussion—along with the “most blogs are just shrill egotistical garbage” that misses the point. Yes, most political blogs consist of little more than partisan supporters spewing rhetoric. Yes, most blogs of all kinds will fail to create anything by way of a community. Yes, the majority of bloggers will one day grow tired or bored and their blogs will fail.
So what?
No one is suggesting that PR people reach out to every blog. But there are a handful of blogs in every space—politics, sport, technology, marketing, PR—that have already established themselves as trusted sources of information, that have established communities of like-minded individuals, that already enjoy influence as real as any mainstream magazine.
Identifying those blogs, knowing the difference between them and their soon-to-be-defunct rivals is one of the reasons companies need to hire experts to guide them through the blogosphere. It’s why PR people need to learn to identify the most influential citizen journalists—the same way they identify the most influential mainstream journalists—and reach out to them, while not wasting time and money and energy on the mass of mediocre, self-indulgent bloggers.