warning: a blog post about blogging

i know.. it's so 2007 to write a blog post about the nature of blogging, but i promise i'll be quick. i recently listened to the most excellent interview with the lovely marcus and faris (both well-spoken and slightly mad brit expats) about all kinds of things, including the vortex of the US/global economic 'downturn' and the changing 'volume' of blogging.

marcus and faris both agreed that all the hoo-har about blogging has died down quite a bit. and the general chit-chat, back'n'forth - conversation - has died down a bit. [so much for the Age of Conversation]. there's theory that RSS feeds may have killed a bit of that comment action - to which i'd probably agree - given that i now read from about 30 feeds every day or two, extending to 100 on a weekly basis, leaving not much time for banter.

however, i've noticed that there are still a small number that i continue to check manually, still comment regularly on and consider a huge influence on my day.

last year, a couple of memes went around and we all had to pick our top 5 blogs ever. what i'm finding fascinating is that 18 months later, after the hundreds of most excellent blogs that i have discovered and discarded, my top 5 remains largely unchanged.

for a while there, marcus wasn't blogging, so NP stole his spot, then colman wasn't blogging and seb stole his spot, now seb is hardly blogging and colman is back, so it's all back to, pretty much back to square 1:

1. rob
2. age
3. marcus
4. ben
5. colman

plus seb, northern planner, dan hill, stan and swiss miss making up the top 10 of must-reads

this isn't to say that i don't have a slew of other awesome blogs that i read, or that i'm not constantly finding new stuff, but i've just realised that consistency matters. those 5 are the ones where i usually have something (lame) to say, where i make sure i check in and the volume is high. the others i keep an eye and get excited when there's new content, but the volume just isn't as high - either they're quieter or i don't have anything to say really. and i find it infinitely interesting that, despite a few more artists blogging more regularly, it's still the ad/comms/design blogs that i engage with. opinionated bunch maybe?

many have mentioned that blogging has merely returned to the influence of friendship and not into some greater über democracy that was being predicted. not sure whether that's the case, but i'll be interested to see who my top 5 are in another 18 months. i have a sneaky suspicion it will be much the same...