Sometime ago, Darren Rowse asked this question on his blog – Problogger. The question kind of stuck in my head and made me think – what is missing from today’s blogosphere? Well, there are two views to answer this question – one as a reader what I still feel lacking in blogs and secondly, as a blogger what technical difficulties I face in today’s blogging platforms. Today I am writing this post as a reader about the things missing or being wrong in today’s blogging world. In the next part, I will be taking a look at the blogger’s angle on this question.
Lack of Original Content
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This is one of the most fundamental problems with the blogosphere. Currently, there are millions of blogs floating around across the blogosphere, scattered across many different subjects ranging from travel, nature, food, cooking to adventure sports, celebrities, gossips, politics and so on. If you type a keyword for specific niche, you will see literally thousands of blogs on the subject. The only problem is with so many blogs, it’s really difficult to know which one is genuine. There is large number of bloggers who just copy from popular sites or free magazines like EzineArticles and paste it on their blog as their own. As a reader, I find overwhelming amount of duplicate content and non-availability of reliable way to establish genuineness of the content.
Lack of Creativity
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Gone are the days when a blog was synonymous to a personal diary. Today blog is a medium which is as effective as any other audio visual media and still, this is the aspect of blogging which is generally ignored. Despite millions of blogs, only a handful few are worth giving a look. Even though the blogosphere is quite matured over number of years, you will find limited amount of professional looking blogs. Most of the blogs can be categorized as too jazzy or too raw. Site errors, unorganized contents, difficult navigation and clumsy reading layout just add to the problems. Again, this can be attributed to rare number of good creative think-bloggers and huge volume of hobbyists.
Lack of Central Control
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Blogging is a free medium where anybody can write on any topic and share it with the world. Agreed, this is one of the greatest benefits of blogging but this important principle of blogging has been abused frequently by bloggers. Today, anybody with few dollars (or even free) can create his own blog without even giving second thought. The entire process is so simple that within 30 minutes you can get professional looking blog ready. But, there is no way for a reader to identify which blogs in particular niche is genuine. Yes, Google can be one way to find that out but not always reliable. There are social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon but they cater only to limited amount of blogs. There are just too many self-proclaimed experts in each niche to be genuine.
Marketing Tool
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In the past few years, due to “six-figure income from blogging” becoming reality, many people have started taking blogging seriously as a money making tool. The focus has been shifted from story-telling to promote self or affiliate products. You will find thousands of blogs teaching you how to make money online and most of them would ask you to purchase an e-book, video series or a course in that area. Now, don’t get me wrong! There are genuine probloggers like Darren Rowse or Yaro starak who know what they are doing and who are well respected in the blogging community. These bloggers are teaching from their experience and helping others. But my focus is on thousands of those copycats who never made even few dimes from their blog but teach how to make “six figure” income from blogging, READERS BEWARE!
Given that, I think blogging is one of the most powerful yet simple, creative yet mass accessible medium if used correctly. What do you think as a reader about problems with current blogosphere? What are your views, criticisms, ideas on this? Please share in the comments below. The next part will cover the Blogger’s perspective to what’s wrong with blogging, don’t miss it! Keep geeking!
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