Has blogging lost its soul?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a guest post by Janet Green.

There’s a lot of crap out there in the blogosphere – get-rich scams, blogs that exist solely to ‘scrape’ content from other blogs, posts written only with SEO in mind, and so much more. To me the existence of these trappings suggest that perhaps blogging has become something of a “dream career,” surrounded now by hucksters who try to entice the lazy with promises of wealth without much work.

As these voices become greater in number and louder in their shouting, it’s possible – even likely – that the essence of blogging could be lost. And so I’m asking a very basic question: has this already happened? Has blogging lost its soul?

What is the soul of blogging?

Of course, we first have to define the soul of blogging before we can determine if it’s been lost. I hope you will share your definition of “the soul of blogging” in the comments below.  Here’s mine:

The soul of blogging is the giving spirit of bloggers.

I’d been blogging about my own minutiae for a few years when I decided to launch a niche blog. My mentor in the leap to “blogging with purpose” was a person who was and is about helping others, Mike Sansone of Converstations. What I learned from Mike is that blogging – even for money – can come from a place of giving (of oneself) rather than seeking rewards. And so for me, if blogging is to retain its soul, bloggers must come from that place of giving in a few different ways:

• They must be authentic. This means they express their own ideas (or build upon/add to the ideas of others) in their own voice.
• They must strive to be altruistic, to be about more than themselves. They cannot be all-consumed with their own expertise, but instead must want to be a resource for their readers, even if that means sharing voices other than their own.
• And they must be generous, seeking to give frequently that which they seek to receive, whether it be comments, or links, or whatever other currency.

So – has blogging lost its soul?

For a brief period in 2007 the blogging pundits were all wondering whether “blogging had peaked” as a medium. This was because a Technorati report on “the health of the blogosphere” showed that the number of daily blog posts worldwide had been dropping. I argued at the time – and I still believe today – that if post quantity was the sole measure of the health of the blogosphere then we were probably delusional about that health anyway. I said at the time:

So while the sheer number of daily posts has perhaps peaked… what’s taking place now is the maturation of the blog from ego-driven, junk-filled novelty to information-rich, purpose-driven conversation.”

This, I argued, was a much better measure of whether “blogging had peaked.” It’s also a fine way to measure whether blogging has lost its soul.

Are bloggers still authentic, altruistic and generous? Mostly, yes. The problem is that the huckster voices – those that seek only to separate you from your money with a big promise, or that exist only to steal your content for the sake of their own “link juice” – seem to be making the most noise, and noise begets attention.

It’s important to remember that those are not the only – or even the primary – voices of the blogosphere. The primary voices are still those who have, over time, established their credentials, given more than they received, and reached out to help others time and time again.

Are some bloggers living a “dream career,” making money from blogging? A few are, yes. But they didn’t get there quickly, and they didn’t get there by hawking some secret formula for blogging success. They built their blogs one authentic, altruistic and generous post at a time. Would that we each could reach that level of success by doing the same.

Janet Green has been blogging since 2002. Her current blogs cover motorcycling, life and family in Des Moines, Iowa, and of course blogging. Her blogs and social media profiles are all linked at www.janetgreen.net.

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