Blogging Is Dead : Long Live The Blog
Yesterday Radio 4 ran an interesting item discussing if Blogging is dead. Of course, they also ran an blog item on the subject which, as I write this has 51 responses.
Blogging is most definitely alive. What has changed are the blog authors. When I first discovered the blogsphere I lived in Australia, and loved learning what the BritPack – a group of British web designers – were up to. A day did not pass without Andy Clark, Andy Budd, John Hicks, Jeremy Keith or Richard Rutter sharing some insightful thoughts on their blog. These days, you’d be hard pushed to receive one update a week between them.
It’s not that they’ve run out of things to say. Many have moved on to micro-blogging through Twitter and the like. I think Twitter is good, but it’s no substitute for a blog entry. I like the fact that a blog entry gets archived and discovered at a later date. To me, blogs are a great resource, where others provide tips on how to get things done Whether it be with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP or Java, the blogsphere is a great resource; a great community. It’s a shame that the web community blogs less often. It’s a loss to the community.
Whilst individual bloggers have departed, the big-boys have moved in. My blogreader receives daily updates from all the news sites, whether it be the BBC, The Guardian, The Register or TechCrunch. This isn’t really blogging; it’s syndicated news – which is initially what RSS was created for. News sites are however changing. They have now fully embraced blogging, whether it be a journo entry, or a host of comments by readers.
Of course, blogs have also been hijacked by the PR and marketing world. PR 2.0 is all about social interaction, and weblogs are great food for Google to swallow and regurgitate.
The thing is, my friends who are not in the tech industry, haven’t a clue about weblogs and RSS feeds and blogreaders. It passed them by. They know about Facebook. They don’t read or write blogs; they don’t listen to podcasts, and they don’t have a clue what Twitter is about. If blogging has died, they won’t miss it one bit.
But blogging is most definitely not dead. The bloggers have changed. Perhaps the audience has changed too. I find myself following the media on my blogreader, and the individuals on Twitter.
Perhaps even the blog medium is beginning to change. Not only do people share thoughts by blogposts, they now share video by YouTube. And yesterday, I discovered a great new concept put out by Jeremy Keith – HuffDuffer – it’s a podcast of audio files. Subscribe through iTunes and find out what other’s are listening to. Here’s a link to my huffduff.
Long live the blog, the micro-blog, the video-blog and the audio-blog.
