Duncan Riley had a good piece at the Inquisitr on that blighted word ‘blog’. It’s always been an ugly encumbrance and now it is also distracting because blogs are, after all, just websites. The good things about blogs and that make them distinctive are:
- they can be updated (published) easily and directly by ordinary people with no particular IT expertise
- they encourage, indeed thrive on, regular updating
- they go out of their way to encourage linking and sharing (i.e. they are much closer to the original intent of the web than the first generation of largely ’stand-alone’ websites)
- they are simple, emphasise content rather thean cute graphics, and are far more user friendly than all that clunky nineties stuff
These blog features have proven to be so effective that they are being rolled out progressively across the whole web, in that sense, the blog revolution has already been won.
The latest round of blogging/ blogosphere is dead angst started with a classic piece of link bait from Paul Boutin in Wired, and was followed up this week an article in The Economist arguing that blogging is no longer what it was because it has entered the mainstream, then a post from Nick Carr arguing that the blogosphere is dead.
The Economist’s piece is the better of the two, arguing that the top of the blogosphere is today indistinguishable from the mainstream media. The correlation between change and pioneers calling death is notable; profound may not be the best description but it most definitely is accurate and a line so well put that it will likely be used many times again in the future.
The Wired article is itself a demonstration of the process I described above. Boutin’s article incorporates all of the web 2.0 type features I described above, and more. It has comments, an RSS feed and a series of cute icons encouraging you to share the article with your friends and communities. Wired might think of itself as a magazine but its layout today owes virtually everything to the blog revolution. Its a classic case of the medium superceding the message. Boutin proclaims the death of the blog but he does it on a webpage which is indistinguishable from a blog.
The Economist article makes the interesting observation:
Simultaneously, companies far outside the media industry have embraced blogging as just another business tool. They are using blogs both to get corporate messages to the public and as an internal medium for staff. Companies like Six Apart, which provides Movable Type, TypePad and other blogging tools, see firms as their most promising market.
To average people, like you and me, this smells like victory but to the kool-aid kids who hopped on the blogging caravan because they thought it was going to be the end of public relations, advertising etc it is disillusioning.
Several years ago I actually got slammed in one of these kool-aid comic books, Naked Conversations, because I put the view that PR would not only survive blogging but do very well out of it.
One truth that has been re-inforced by the last few years of blogging is that it is not easy. Technically, of course, it is no harder than sending an email. But content, dear chap, that is the hard part. Many people can’t write, or don’t feel the need to do it every day, and many people, it turns out, don’t have much to say, or much they want to say to the world at large. Carr points out:
Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent “state of the blogosphere” study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they’re a whole lot lower than we’ve been led to believe. “I find those numbers shockingly low,” writes Bray; “clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought.
Long-term this is not bad for companies, governments, associations and NGOs which do have a lot to say and important, continuing, reasons for communicating. After all, that’s why they spend a lot of money, sometimes huge amounts, on communications each year.
Blogging is becoming a victory for all those interested in better communications.
2 Comments
Evolution not over
Blogs are also free websites. I started my site as a very novice blogger in July 2007. A clear focus and a lot of naivete helped sustain it, plus the time generated by retirement from the paid workforce.
Most of the debates about the death of blogging miss the point. The web is what you make of it and take from it. It was never a revolution, just evolution. The linking of blogging/websites with social media facespace sites and multi-media has been one aspect of the changing webscape.
Many of us had a ball last week live blogging Obamania on sites like crikey and Voices without Votes. I used to joke when I travelled overseas about being a citizen of the world. Now anyone can be that and even a cit journalist of the world as well.