My colleague Esther Weltevrede has compiled this excellent list of things Wired has declared dead over the past years.

Wired: intitle:”* is dead” site:wired.com

The Wired Graveyard:
The Web Is Dead
Futurism Is Dead
Skype on Fring Is Dead
The desktop is dead
“Cyberspace” Is Dead
Devo Is Dead
Copyright Dead
DRM Is Dead
The Police Interceptor Is Dead.
Cthulhu Is Dead
Pontiac is Dead
Advertising Dead?
The Viper is Dead
Missile Defense Is Dead
The Western Blot is Dead
eDonkey Is Dead
‘Long-Term Accumulate’ Is Dead
WiFi is Dead
Garfield is Dead
Rock Is Dead
Tim Russert is Dead
Divx Is Dead
Paper Is Dead
iTunes Dead?
PUNK IS NOT DEAD!!!
The Album Is Dead
The Tivo Box Is Dead
Code Red Is Dead
PDA Is Dead
The Creator of the Ramen InstaNoodle Is Dead
Is Interactive Dead?
The TV Is Dead

Thanks @esthr!

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).