Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion condems the lazy blogger in The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging. He wonders why tech blogs have devolved from "...people who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again..."
It's almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.
I think the regression to lazy blogging results from two factors:
-- the need to generate content to keep the AdSense dollars flowing. No new content, fewer visitors, fewer ad clicks.
-- the hard work it takes to maintain a blog, which is no different from the hard work it takes to maintain any publication.
The pattern is well known: create a new, easier way to publish, and many new publishers emerge. After some time, it's no longer new, and no longer fun, so the multitude drop off. This occurred with the penny-dreadful press in England in the 1800s, with "easy" DTP in the 1980s, Web sites in the 1990s, and now blogging in the 2000s.
Comments