Is there a decline in the potential of the form?

Addendum to post about weblogs obsessing on the trivia of people’s lives. I should clarify that I wasn’t so much talking about the tendency to write about the trivia of one’s life, but about the public perception of the weblogging phenomenon. Since I started it seems to have evolved from being viewed as a kind of web filter or industry comment organ through to being a kind of dynamic diarist medium where quality of writing was paramount to finally being viewed as a populist organ for the dissemination of trivia. I have no problem with weblogs of any of these types – and in fact they all have existed in one for or another for years before Blogger emerged. What I’m slightly surprised by is how the dominant perception of them has changed from journalism to personal writing to trivia. The ‘potential’ of the form seems to have become less interesting to people…