I finally got round to reading that Wired article that everyone’s been talking about. The one where they said:
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.
And I agree. Sort of.
What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.
I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.
Platforms
I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.
This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate – although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.
For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.
i think you’re right, but i prefer to call them ‘presences’. Generally i think you’ve got your central platform, which is your content centre, foundation, whether you’re a vlogger, blogger, podcaster, whatever, then you have your presences around them. i’ve started to call these presences around the hub, a social aura, the aura grows out your content across the social media. that’s my two cents anyway.
i really like ’social habits’ as well, very neat term :D
Comment by Richard | 5 November 2008, 1:47 pm
I think you have a point, and you know I’m a huge fan of your website (which is why I want that IM moment to discuss you doing one for me..).
However, I still very much enjoy longer, less frequent and better written blog posts. I’ve personally unsubscribed from almost all of the blogs that seem obsessed with “the daily update” and instead read those that post less / better quality articles.
For me, the blog function has moved from being “in the know” (I too get that from twitter/IM/etc) and more about well-considered opinion. Related to this, I find myself blogging very much less – once, I was a “post a day” man, now I post once every couple of weeks – and I think my readers appreciate it. I spend longer thinking about articles, feel less pressured when writing, and think the quality has gone up as a consequence of this.
Comment by Mike | 5 November 2008, 2:04 pm
I think the blog still has a place in the mix, perhaps less prominent than recently. It’s the only space you have to freely expand on your ideas (unless you’re like me and just hijack other people’s comments to do that, rather than be bothered to set up my own blog :-)
Twitter in particular has proved a great source of ad-hoc information, but it’s not really a good medium to browse through and expand on a topic – it’s transitory only. Flickr has slightly more permanence even though the backlog archive I’m sure gets largely forgotten. However, a blog seems more like a library of thoughts and information that can be dipped into a referred to constantly, helped by the tagging and cross-referencing that seems to be intrinsic to the medium.
I’d rather see blogging evolve than just chucked on the rubbish heap just because some people are using it differently.
Ironically, now it seems to be regarded as passé, FaceBook is rather good at drawing many of these thing together in a better way than FriendFeed.
My other main problem with the ‘distributed’ model is the amount of linking up that has to be done. For example now I’ve found you I ‘have’ to go through each of the services we’re both members of (e.g. flickr, friendfeed, linkedin, twitter, etc.) and link up. I want a single click!
Comment by Seb Crump | 6 November 2008, 4:45 pm
@Seb Crump ooh you’re a ‘comment blogger’.. or is that a ‘clogger’? ;)
It’s exciting to see blogging coming of age. It’s interesting to see it referred to as being a ‘higher quality’ medium than others.
That would seem to contradict Wired’s ‘tsunami of bilge’ definition :)
For us web obsessives it makes sense that the blog would provide an additional space in which to expand thoughts beyond 140 characters but for ‘normal’ folks wanting to make a mark on the web I would expect that it is still the number one medium of choice.
And it is this approach to blogging – purely as a publishing platform (rather than an extension of other online activity) – that is partly to blame for this ‘tsunami of bilge’ (to misquote the Wired article) in the blogosphere.
Forget novels, could the horrible truth be that there is a blog inside all of us?
Comment by Jenny | 6 November 2008, 6:03 pm
jenny hi! i need to meet you for a coffee to catch up with digital life. i am so 2004… how about it?
Comment by jonny | 7 November 2008, 1:06 pm