China Herald: Bokee died, does blogging too?

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A new way
via CrunchBaseSina reported it first and it is now all over the online conversation, erstwhile blogging hero Bokee has stopped its operation.
For those who were not part of the online prehistoric times: Bokee.com used to be one of the leading blogging platforms, earning both praise and despise from other early bloggers, because it took very early a very commercial track. It started blogs for celebrities and not in all cases it was clear whether those celebrities knew themselves they had a blog.
I leave it up to others at the Chinese bloghosphere to write the official obituary of the service, or go after remaining scandals like unpaid wages for their employees.
Its demise comes at a time when also others, for example at the upcoming CNbloggercon, are discussing whether weblogs are still the force of change they have been for a short while. How news, information is used at the internet is clearly not only transforming the traditional media, but has also its effects on the (now) old-style approaches of weblogs.
What is happening is a giant decentralisation of information on the internet. In the past we needed portals, as the replacements of their old-fashioned offline papers to bring together that information in a centralized place. They might still have that function on a smaller scale, where bloggers are focusing on smaller groups like their closest friends and family, but it has become outdated as a way to bring together news as a kind of aggregated service. We have seen a spike in those services in the past few years, and they might still have a function for all those who are not in the vanguard of the online changes, but their future is grim. When your core business is copying-and-pasting the New York Times without much added value to the individual entries, you are working for a decreasing audience of internet users who cannot google.
An illustration of that change was the blogroll. Initially that was the hallway to more information and actually a useful tool to draw the attention of search engines too. But the way I collect information has changed and the blogroll does not have the same function again. Last year I started to make people upset by not adding their weblogs to my anyway too long list and earlier this year I removed the blogroll all together.
Most of my visitors do not enter this weblog over the frontpage, but they go through links, looking for specific entries, or come through search engines, looking for specific key words. Also this weblog has left the short phase in time it might have been a small scale portal for a small group of people.
So, what is coming next? As online tools like rss, online social networks like Facebook and new communication tools like twitter and friendfeed have taken on the stage, focus is going the online conversation. It might be chatter, debate or slander, but the exchange between internet users drives both interest and traffic. Only when - traditional media and new media - develop into a powerhouse of content, they might survive the new wave of change that is already taking its first victims.
We still need platforms, to publish our thoughts and entries, but where and how they are being published is less important, as long as search engines and people can find them.
That means, you have to make money through those means to, if money is on the agenda. We are only in the early phases of this new and major shift in online behaviour. The existing portals can of course still survive, since media users tend to be rather conservative and like change less than then sometimes assume of themselves. But, yes, times are changing, yet again.

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