Blogs Are So Over? LOLOLOL
Posted by Bob Warfield on October 21, 2008
No sooner do I pen my anti-curmudgeonly Enterprise 2.0 piece than the blogosphere is awash with the antics of another curmudgeon. This time its Paul Boutin, a professional Valley Wag blogger, who writes (in a blog for Wired Magazine), that blogging is over. It’s so 2004. Here is his version of what replaces blogging:
“@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?”
Excellent. Blogs are killed by Flickr (huh?), Twitter, and Facebook according to Boutin. What a goof. This is Sarah Lacey quality curmudgeoning, though not quite at the level of a Nick Carr.
Mathew Ingram elegantly lambasts Boutin with the following hilarious sarcasm:
So there you have it. Case closed. Jason Calacanis, whose blog was intended solely to promote the entity known as Jason Calacanis, and Robert Scoble — a man who claims it’s possible to interact in a meaningful way with 10,000 Twitter friends and 50,000 Facebook friends. These are the people Boutin wants us to look to for guidance on how to live our lives online?
I can only add that Calcanis gave up blogging for a form of communication that is even more dead according to the Chief Council of Curmudgeons: E-mail!
What’s Boutin up to here? Well, it’s just good old-fashioned flamebait. It’s the reason why many bloggers post what I call Curmudgeonly pieces, or why others, like Robert Scoble write controversial posts. It’s all about the traffic, and if blogs were truly over, there would be no traffic to chase.
Blogs won’t really be over until there is another medium where people can express themselves in a little longer format than Twitter that’s as easy as blogging. That’s not to say it won’t improve. There is a lot to be done to further evolve blogging platforms. A lot is underway already in terms of facilitating the conversation that is comments, for example.
bigcheeser said
Surely the point is not that blogging is dead so let’s adopt the next piece of hyped technology. Instead its rather more that blogging is maturing as people find its purpose. If my memory serves me right, the technorati figures show the average number of blog posts a day has declined – so for sure it’s not a growth area – but it’s not dead or dying – it’s simply stabilising to an environment of real value rather than spurious diaries etc.
smoothspan said
Bigcheeser, welcome!
If in fact blogging is stabilising to an environment of real value rather than spurious, that’s even more at odds with what Boutin tries to claim, which is that the blogosphere is so polluted with spam as to be useless. I don’t find that to be
the case, in fact quite the opposite. I reach for Google Blog Search instead of vanilla Google whenever possible because there is so much less noise than on the vanilla web.
Cheers,
BW
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