Observations on blog trend

2008 marks the year of blog deflation while 2006-2007 sees the peak of blog creation. A quick analysis of any bubble-bust cycle says that you can tell it’s a bubble when every other dump human being is doing it and trying to make money off of it. Just like you can tell a housing bubble burst is imminent when your cashier hands you a business card and tells you that she’s going to be a real estate agent next year. Nevertheless, it just proves the basic theory of “how to get rich”. 1. You inherit it 2. You win a lottery 3. You do something well and you do it again and again.

Signs of the Bust

I’ve been surfing through Blogmad and Blogexplosion in an attempt to bump into some random quality blogs. In 2007 I see mostly blogs that are devoid of content and filled with ads that no one ever clicks. In 2008, it gets even harder to stumble upon some quality blog because I keep on hitting deleted or abandoned blogs. Based on the statistics obtained while cleaning up my archived bookmarks, 95% of the sites I used to visit in 2000 have disappeared off the face of earth.

I also saw the demise of PayPerPost (now IZEA) as Google demoted most of the blogs that got paid to write about whatever the advertisers want. I am guessing that the name change to Izea is another failed attempt at avoiding the Google hammer. In the beginning, it was used by bloggers as a fast way to get incoming links and in turn, increase a blog’s google page rank.

People also started grabbing every domain name they can find as if they are hot real estate. I am pretty sure that at the time of this writing, every word in the English dictionary has already been taken. There are news that Network Solutions actually grabs and registers your domain name once you searched for it so that you are forced to register through them at 6 times the original cost. Google is putting the axe on this practice by not allowing adsense to work on domains less than 5 days old (You can cancel the registration within 5 days)

Implications

What will be the negative consequences of a blog bust? I think the immediate impact will be on these domain name hoggers because it takes money to keep these registered. Then a few startups that relies on blogging.

Web design and web hosting companies are next in line to see some earnings decrease and we will see a cool down in demand of web apps. Seriously I think I am just about saturated by web 2.0 applications. There’s almost a new tool everyday that help do the same thing but in a different manner. So the software industry will go down along with it and we’ll finally see a cease in hot demands of software programmers.

Since SEO only represent a tiny part of Google’s searches, I believe that even if that notion got wiped out, it still won’t affect Google, so google stays.