Something that did the rounds on Twitter this afternoon (which I spotted thanks to Steve Davies and Kellye Crane) is a piece by Paul Boutin on Wired titled "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004.")
The argument is essentially, blogging is dead, long live the new blogging - expressing yourself through pictures, personal updates and short 140 character messages.
Paul Boutin says blogs are now dominated at the top end by sites like the Huffington Post, which are really online magazines with teams of writers. And at the bottom end you have:
"The Net's lowest form of life: The insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack is sure to scribble beneath it, "Lame. Why don't you just suck McCain's ass." (Obviously I haven't graduated to get even this kind of attention yet!)
So you might as well pack up and go home now.
There's just one problem with his central argument. He works from the premise that blogging needs to be a numbers game - enlighten the world with your thoughts and watch the fans flock to you. And that - that idea is indeed very 2004.
Today, anyone who blogs solely to get readers is really on a hiding to nothing. Unless you are some kind of minor celebrity, you just aren't going to get thousands of readers overnight and you shouldn't expect to.
But as I see it (and I'd think I'm not alone here), there still is value in maintaining a blog as it:
1 - Helps me build a dialogue with like minded people. On my "slow" days I barely get 50 people coming here, but actually that's fine. That's 50 people who are interested enough to hear what I have to say, and to build on it.
It really is the quantity vs quality thing. If you do want to artificially inflate visitor numbers, there are ways you can do so - though most will hang around for 5 secs and then leave.
Personally I'm more interested in where people come from than how many. According to my site stats over the past month less than one in five visitors have been from the UK while 2/3 have been from the US, Canada and Australia. That's good as I've made a connection with people I'd never have done otherwise.
2 - It gets my brain in gear and makes me gather trends and stats that I then use in the day job.
3 - It serves as a database of articles that I use in client work. As Ben Kunz at Thought Gadgets pointed out a few months back, you've probably got enough material in a blog like this to fill a book (not that anyone would want to read it, were I to publish!)
4 - It forces me to fine tune my writing. We're always learning after all
5 - Something that's of less interest to me, but a site like this is a way of building your personal brand. For example, if you are in the job market, in some instances it can be a disadvantage not to have a blog. Related to this online journalism lecturers like Mindy McAdams see it as an absolute must-have for anyone coming into the industry.
So blogs RIP? If people who've been here for the wrong reasons pack up, fair enough. But maybe it's not time to write the obituary just yet.
Image - By DBarefoot.
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7 comments:
I agree with most of the post. except, I cannot get excited enough to write about topics I'm not passionate about
Dirk - nicely put! You should get out of blogging if you want to be a superstar, but not if you just like the idea of putting your ideas out there and sharing with others ...all the talk about rankings, hits and popularity is essentially garbage anyhow, because (here's a hot tip) **no one actually cares**...
Well said, I read the post that inspired this one and was going to respond, but you've done such a good job I don't think I need to! :-)
Is it possible these claims say more about the accuser than the accused?
I find it amusing that the twitter-stars, sprouting about every little thing to get noticed (yes, I am tweeting too), accuse bloggers of looking for stardom. I relate to your points about personal reasons for writing a blog. I use mine both to gather thoughts about my Masters research, to build a dialogue about my areas of interest (mainly KM and enterprise-class social media tools) and finally to act as a sort of aggregator of these trends and techs for a few of my friends who simply don't have the time to do the reading I do across my field.
Great post.
God every time something new comes along, someone predicts the "death" of the thing before. I still listen to the radio and read the newspaper, even though I have an ipod and the newspapers are all online - it's just a shift in habits.
I find that I'm reading more blogs than ever at the moment and they tend to all be quality that I've found via other similar blogs. (Ok except for the Superficial, which is my guilty pleasure). Most of the blogs I read are passionate people with interesting/eclectic taste so I broaden my horizons.
Twitter will never ever take over blogging. It is a useful service but you can't expand an idea in 140 characters - it's like a phone call vs a text message. They both have their uses, but one won't kill the other.
Thank you for all the comments!
I think it's obvious to say that we'd all much rather have visitors than not, but absolutely, there does have to be some other reason to it.
And I agree Cheryl, in my case the number of blogs I subscribe to has if anything grown rather than gone down and I'm onto my 2nd tab on my netvibes page to make room for them all!
Finally I'm again surprised by how few communications and journalism graduates have one up and running.
Though sadly we didn't have a job available at the time, from personal experience I can think of one applicant whose stuff stood out from everything else I received because she had a blog.
I could instantly get a sense for her thought processes, interests and her writing style - something I wouldn't really glean from a 2 page word doc CV.
Right on. I'm so tired of people talking about stats and followers. The average small-town paper has a greater circ that A-list bloggers.
I also think blogging is a new way to *learn* -- when we write about world events, we digest them in a new way. I've had many meetings with clients were suddenly I find myself riffing on emerging media trends, information I never retained before simply by reading the media. Instead, because I have to focus on material to recast and present on it in my blog, I truly understand it.
Except for that whole internet advertising thing which is still damn confusing ;)
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