Blogs declared dead… again
After the trackback has been declared dead over and over again the phenomenon of blogging is now facing the same fate. Twitter and other social networking sites have been heralded as the future applications. The medium of blogs (“blogs are dead“) has been declared dead aproximately 14,800 times and the practice of blogging (“blogging is dead“) aproximately 19,000 times.
I read several critiques on the ‘blogging is dead’ article in the recent edition of Wired Magazine. Now that ‘Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004‘ has also been published online I guess the oldfashioned blogosphere is ready for even more critiques.
According to Wired Magazine blogs are impersonal, food for flames and you shouldn’t even botter with blogging as your blog will always be outranked by Wiki pages.
What Paul Boutin fails to recognize is the transformation of traditional blog software into more robust Content Management Systems. Boutin still sees blogs as a text-based medium that do not allow for different kinds of blogging practices:
Further, text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth. (Paul Boutin)
Not only has the popular blogging software WordPress been working and improving image and video implementation, tons of plugins exist to make these types of publishing easy for non-techies too. Multimedia is part of the current blogging medium and practice and will become even more important in the near future.
As a final note I would like to say that I see Twitter and social networking sites as complementing the medium and practice of blogging by integrating them into your blog. I use Twitter and my blog differently and some things are typical Twitter material (@mycolleague running 5 minutes late due to traffic) while other things require more than 140 characters and additional photos and videos (such as my lecture transcriptions).
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New blog post: Blogs declared dead… again http://tinyurl.com/5z83fs
As a comment on the wired-article:
First of all, it strikes me as a weird fact that one wants to get his message out that blogging is dead as best as possible, and therefor chooses to use… a blog.
Moreover, the point made about not getting read as a blogger is of course a nonsense; the same goes for your average dusty holiday-flickr account or all the narcisistic youtube-efforts…And since a large chunk of editors on Wiki are software, one cannot really state that wiki is the new personal, interactive stage, either.
As a comment on your comment:
I do agree that sns, youtube, flickr and microblogging are seen in better light as complementary media rather than competative.
But apparently, everybody want to coin the demise of the blogosphere (why is this?). So something must be troubling, or wrong with it… Any light on where these comments come from?
Great comment on the narcissism that drives many of the popular web2.0 services.
The demise of the blogosphere is an interesting meta view. Regarding to what’s wrong with the blogosphere my take would be its fragmentation and distributed nature. Due to current technology implementations and constraints a few blogging features do not function optimally: commenting and linking. I previously described these issues in Where Do You Leave Your Comments? and On Using Manual and/or Automatic Link Notification Systems.
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