Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Brian Solis of techcrunch asks an interesting question. Are blogs losing their authority to the status spehere? He thinks so, and provides his reasoning for this.

So why do I believe that blog authority is losing its authority?

It goes back to the definition of authority. Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

While the observation is interesting, ther reason behind this trend is quite simple. First of all when he refers to statusphere, he is talking about microblogging sites such as twitter, friendfeed, tumblr etc. They are also a form of blogging as the name microblogging suggests. They make it easy to blog and respond to blogs. So they are actually spreading the infulence of blogging.

While regular blogs are more about content production, microblogging is about distribution. If the authority is measured by links and linkbacks (thank google pagerank for that), then it is natural for microblogging to have increasing authority when compared to conventional blogs.

But in the end both are about enabling consumers to become producers, so it doesn’t really matter.