German blogosphere waning, bloggers quitting, says Ifra blog

I’ll be heading off to Dublin, Ireland around the beginning of November to speak at IFRA’s Beyond the Printed Word, the world’s leading association for newspaper and media publishing. I’ll be speaking about “Integration of Web 2.0 services into news sites”, sharing our experiences with Thoughtleader, Newsinphotos and Amatomu.com.

I’ve just noticed that IFRA have started an official blog for the conference, with a few interesting blog posts — the latest being that there is a “Crisis in the German blogosphere“. Writing on the blog, Gordon Steiger notes:

Looking at the decreasing click rates at Technorati, fewer visitors, less links and lively commenting only happening from time to time, some of the (former) major bloggers in Germany are thinking aloud of quitting their blogs or having a break. Bloggers writing for the audience and not for themselves are experiencing the decreasing interest in blogs as the big hype is over and the watchers are gone. I personally think this is a healthy situation, as we are going to see a lot of blogs vanish, mainly those who were just blogging about blogging or trying to sell the idea of blogging to companies – the so-called PR and marketing bloggers. After this cleaning process, the interesting blogs will survive – good content will still be there and meaningless content will be gone.

I wonder if other countries will follow a similar pattern to the German experience or if this is just a blip? It was interesting to note that after massive activity in the local blogosphere over the so-called Bullardgate fracas and the De Lille saga, the Blogosphere went rather quiet. Many attributed it to the arrival of Facebook, which saw diverted attention spans. Everyone, including my mother and my friend’s cat (yes, Catbook), appears to be on Facebook these days.

But in the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a slow increase in activity in the local blogosphere, with amatomu.com — one of the local blog aggregators — tracking around 300k page impressions daily, which is roughly double that of a few months back. It also may be World Cup Rugby related.

And yes — I do get time for some sleep guys 😉