2004 • April • 30

Has it been quiet?

I know I've been Rip-van-Winkeling it in the blogosphere, but has it been getting quieter? At least in the tech circles? Going back through some of my archives, I see raging RSS wars, REST vs XML-RPC arguments, and a slew of little Lazyweb mini-innovations on a daily basis. Hell, even the next long-anticipated release of MovableType is reported to be meatless. Also, since I've started actually paying attention to some statistics in my aggregator, I've noticed a large swath of my 2-3 year old subscriptions have been long silent.

Seems like it's been a long time since something with the buzz of Trackback or Radio UserLand tweaks or Instant outlining or RSS autodetection poked its head up. Maybe it's just blog tech reaching a plateau of relative maturity, or maybe everyone's just getting bored with this stuff. Personally, one of the main reasons I switched back to MovableType was because of all the long-solved problems and plugins written for me. I'm mostly tapped out with tinkering with blog software itself. Granted, I have more things I want to do with this site (and want to write about them), but I want to get down to actual writing and tinkering and writing about tinkering with things other than this blog.

Of course, over the last year or two, I have stopped monitoring a handful of feeds that tended to be at the center of various teacup tempests, so maybe I've just moved myself far enough from the fray that things just sound quiet. I'm sure there are still the old wars still raging that I've just managed to quarantine from my scans. Eh, if so, that's not a bad thing.

So now that I'm ostensively back... what am I missing?

Archived Comments

Buzz Andersen

2004-04-30T00:59:12

I've noticed that too. I've almost wondered if the blogosphere is sort of running out of gas or something.
Chris Snyder

2004-04-30T01:44:48

Fewer unemployed/underemployed technocrati? Also, I wonder how much online journaling has gone underground, hidden behind access control or just not posted to the web for personal, professional, or legal reasons?
fluffy

2004-04-30T05:57:28

Hey, even Kottke's been pretty quiet lately. I think maybe the buzz over weblogs has just died down; I mean, how long can people weblog about weblogging about conferences about weblogging about kitten pictures?
Phil Ringnalda

2004-04-30T09:12:25

Eh, you've been around long enough to have gone through several of these, haven't you? Just like the way stuff sweeps through dorms or boarding schools where lots of overly open and suggestible people are crammed together, we all notice a bit of a slowdown, so we have less to react to, so then someone writes about it being slow... The nice thing is that every single time, there are even more new people who aren't being infected, and may even still be in their first flush of infatuation with weblogs, posting like rats with a crack dispensing lever. Pick a keyword that you're interested in, and trot it over to Feedster or PubSub or one of the dozens of others, and find some new stuff to read, poke around their blogrolls, basically act like it's 2000 (or whatever your year was) again. Or, look through your referrers (how long has it been?) for people you don't recognize linking to you, and see what they have to say. Either way, does wonders for me.
Phillip Pearson

2004-05-02T05:35:55

Feels quiet to me. Doesn't seem like a lot of interesting public projects are in action right now. IMHO the good stuff is going on behind closed doors - Bloglines, Technorati, Six Apart, Google, etc. UserLand, which always seemed to be at the center of anything new and interesting, is in maintenance mode, and the Atom boys are just quietly doing their stuff. Don't know what the RDF people are into right now. Can't think of anything cool to do with the Topic Exchange, and I'm running out of disk space and bandwidth anyway. Marc Canter et all are going strong with the PeopleAggregator open source SNS project, but I don't exactly know where they're aiming there. Umm ...