I completely understand this. When I used to write journal articles for scientific audiences, you take ungodly amounts of time to write them to last for all eternity. The thought is that someone might go searching for your dusty journal article in a library 100 years later – better think about what you say VERY carefully. I liked that. Half of what we wrote was wrong anyway, but that's because we were pushing the limits of knowledge, not because we didn't have any knowledge to begin with.

 

Blogging has become, for most, exactly the opposite - writing in real-time for an audience that spans a week at most (more like a day or two). Three days later, who remembers a blog post? Hardly anyone for the average post. Even the quite above average post. There are simply too many above average posts and above average people writing in real time, and a tremendous amount of overlap. Let's face it, compared to the human genome project, pretty much anyone is qualified to write about the White House social media policy or how they feel about music or apps or potholes or anything else.

 

If the former is the "Cult of the Expert" and the latter is the "Cult of the Amateur," then where does that leave us? Neither is great. I don't think that everyone should try to think like an academic nor taking on their writing style thus, but I'm with Andrew Keen on this one – all this blogging is a total mindsuck beyond any reasonable proportion or logic. (I'm not even sure what that means, but who cares? This is just a blog.)

 

The primary research and cultivation problem with the blogging ecosystem that has evolved around this cult of the amateur is that rarely does someone go back and research the archives of a blog. And unlike academia, there are not good databases like ISI's Web of Science for uncovering historical blog posts, nor truly unbiased ratings systems that interface with such a database for how influential a blog or a post is.

 

So what happens to a blogger trying to achieve greatness is that they write something good once and then never talk about it again, and if a blogger is really ahead of the curve no one really sees them write about it (Geoff mentions his personal example of writing about FourSquare once, eight months ago) and so then when your audience catches up or new audience joins, they want you to write about "it" again. Guess what? Maybe I don't want to explain my thoughts on SXSW four times in one year – do some research in my archives.

 

What's the solution? Well, one can call it a day on the blog, or one can pull a "Gawker" and continuously crank out material on the topic of the day, linking everything together in a faux-journalism search for the almighty eyeball. That's fine but it's not for everyone and it's surely not for intellectuals. And very few people can be like (say) Clay Shirky or Clive Thompson and just have one great post every month or two that everyone pays attention to.

 

So, I don't blame Geoff Livingston for "retiring" from his Buzz Bin blog in the slightest. It's not great to have a blog and not be passionate about it. And when you're not running the blog to make money, who cares about numbers of eyeballs? It about the passion of the audience, however large. I imagine that Geoff will pour his passion into slightly different topics, and write for slightly different audiences, and ultimately this is what's best for everyone.

 

Some people in my audience might take a lesson from Geoff. Not every blog has to be like Gawker or Mashable or whatever, and just like your blog doesn't need to be updated eight times a day, neither does it have to last forever. Follow your heart.