Musings of the Great Eric

Squash has a post this morning titled Tech Blogosphere has peaked (which, ironically, I found because it floated up near the top of tech.memeorandum).

His evidence:

You might have noticed that Gabe launched his memeorandum engine into another vertical yesterday - baseball. The reality is, he had to. Since Christmas, tech.memeorandum has been trending downwards. It hasn’t been a plummet or anything, but there’s a very definite gradual decline there. In March, that decline got a little bit steeper and a little more consistent. And it wasn’t just memeorandum, Tailrank pretty much mimicked the traffic flow as well.

Personally, I don’t see Memeorandum launching a baseball tracker as spelling doom and gloom for tech - rather that’s a sign that the blogosphere is expanding into decidedly non-geek areas, and has become big enough that a memetracker can actually work its magic. That’s a good thing, and I’d fully expect Memeorandum to expand into other topic areas, in fact I’d welcome it.

Now, let’s take a step back and look at the traffic situation. It grew through the end of January, plateaued in February, and declined in March. Is that a sign that the blogosphere is declining, or might it have something to do with the topic at hand?

Industries ebb and flow with the seasons. Technology is more fast paced than most, but it’s really no different. Most of the major product launches are going to come pre-Christmas. January is a good season as well, as gift certificates have turned that into a pretty lucrative shopping season in it’s own right, plus there’s CES and a few other conventions and shows. By the time spring and summer role around though, the weather gets warmer and people’s attention shifts to the outdoors, and most of these companies are busy developing the products that will be talked about next Christmas. So what’s a blogger to do? Ultimately, they re-hash the same old stories, latch onto the fewer news stories that do emerge, all while keeping an eye on the window, wanting to spend the day outside themselves.

At least, that type of explanation makes more sense to me than declaring that the tech blogosphere itself has peaked, which seems like a premature declaration to me. Tech journalism is probably the most news cycle dependent of any domain. It’s really just talking about products and press releases, and trying to read the tea leaves to determine what will come next. With very rare exceptions, there’s no investigative tech journalism, no digging for stories in the tech field… what would there be to uncover? Anyone who’s followed tech blogs have probably noticed the dearth of activity on the weekends, because companies only do press releases and product launches on Monday through Friday (and those tend to be early in the week, at that). There’s no reason to think the time of year wouldn’t have a similar impact.

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