I managed to fall of the face of the earth this week, but I have a good excuse – I’ve been building a USB mouse.
Don’t ask.
Anyway, today I ran across this article via autowin. Basically, the author of the article claims – half tongue-in-cheek – that blogs are dead. The popular ‘blogs’ are actually online magazines written by professional writers, and the individual blogger can’t compete. Nor would she want to – the popular blogs are too impersonal to satisfy the spirit of blogging. Instead, the author claims that the discerning wannabe writer should turn to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter for an outlet.
Of course, he was promptly dismantled in the comments – but I think that all of those people missed the point.
Here’s the thing: I hate Twitter. I hate Flickr. And I fucking hate Facebook. (I’ve seen far too Facebook breakups, not to mention the general ‘friend obsession’ and overall waste of time). I despise all of those services.
But I’m glad that they exist.
I think that the author of the Wired article is absolutely right – blogging is dead for people who use it in the way that he’s describing. Blogging is not for personal communication! It fails miserably at that task! (Besides, we have Email and IM for personal communication) Blogging is a publishing technique, not a social network. To be sure, networks certainly develop around blogging, but the purpose of a blog is to publish information, not to make friends.
Back when blogs were the ‘next big thing’ I hated them, too. If you had something to say, I thought, you should say it on a static webpage! Blogs were for people who wanted to talk about the weather/a party/random personal stuff, post pictures of their cat, bitch mindlessly about their pitiful lives, tell everyone how cool they were, generally display their ignorance, or, most importantly, try and get more readers (aka friends) then the next person.
Guess where all of those people have gone?
Now that I have realized that blogging is a wonderful form of publishing, I glad that most of the self-involved attention seekers have moved on to another medium. It just means fewer distractions for those of us who actually have something to say.