Greatly exaggerated
Uncategorized November 10th, 2008
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain
It seems everyone and everyone is quick to shovel the dirt over the grave of blogs. WIRED magazine calls blogs “so 2004.” Performancing.com writes about Life After Blogs (HT: Matthew K. Tabor). I’m not buying it.
I suppose much of the argument depends on how you define what a blog is. A discussion about that very topic recently came across my Twitter radar screen. In response to an inquiry about defining blogs, the ever thoughtful Bud Hunt (aka budtheteacher) wrote the following:
Defined that way, especially in the education “sector,” I see great continued value in blogs. We might quibble over the name, but online publishing in many of its current forms is an important part of connectivism or networked learning. If each of us is to remain a viable node on a dynamic online learning network, I believe blogging is reasonably essential. The blog is a space where we reflect on and share our learning, and in more than 140 characters (NOTE: I think Twittering and blogging are not mutually exclusive; I often get ideas for blog posts when there’s something I can’t express in 140 characters. See e.g. this post).
I think there are also different reasons why people blog. If the goal is to build a readership, then, in my opinion, if you build a site/space with content that’s of high quality, that’s relevant and that engages readers, the site/space will have staying power (i.e. if you build that, they will come). For example, if you missed reading fivethirtyeight.com during the presidential election, I think you missed some awesome blogging. I don’t know how the authors intend to proceed post-election, but they built a blog-based site that was really high quality, really timely and really engaging (their maps and graphs were so simple, yet so effective).
However, if your goal is, as Bud Hunt wrote, to “write to understand, to know,” then metrics such as Technorati rankings are much less relevant. Such a blog only dies when the author no longer finds value in the process.
That all said, I do have a couple of thoughts/reflections/concerns about the blogosphere in general:
- I’m mostly familiar with education-related blogs; probably 80% of the feeds in my Google Reader account are from education-related blogs. In that “sector,” I’ve noticed a certain seasonality to blogging. Over the summer, the blog posts were flowing in. Now that we’re well into academic year 2008-09, they are not as frequent. Like me, I think many edubloggers really got into the flow of publishing when time allowed over the summer. However, it is harder to find time for blogging during the academic year. I may just be projecting here, but I wonder what others think about this.
- I continue to believe that too many good conversations get away from us. I think there are too many folks out there who read an interesting or provocative blog post, and instead of commenting there, write their own blog post which references (and links back to) the original post. I know that if the linkbacks work properly, there will be a connection between the posts. But, in my opinion, that’s like trying to take the conversation over to your space, your network. I think it would be OK to write such a post, but to then direct your readers over to the original post and encourage them to comment and add to that conversation.
I will certainly watch the state of the blogosphere with great interest. But, I refuse to believe that I’m watching the end of a valuable form of writing and publishing.
Your reflection 2 seems the main reason for blogs to go down. Having maintained an education blog for 5+ years, I’m very well versed in the “conversations get away” issue. From the comments on my blog, I must be the worlds most uninteresting writer.
Yet when I write at Fireside ( a community forum) it rarely fails to generate some response, and if I take my time, a good bit.
Twitter I still don’t get. I use it with a couple friends, mostly when traveling. Can’t understand how/why anyone would let their remaining attention span be more reduced.
I think this could be a symptom of blogging becoming more mainstream — or rather, the fact that it’s not the flashy, new, cool thing on the Internet anymore. Twitter and Qik and other super-cool new tools are grabbing people’s attention right now, but I don’t see these replacing blogs as sources of information and discussion.
“Blogs” I think are becoming a standard publishing platform now. Perhaps tools like Twitter are taking the conversation (ie. comments?) elsewhere, but I think the popularity and influence of blogs will continue to grow.
Nice post, Jon.
A couple things, first I think one needs to separate out the get away from, vs derail thing. Generally if I can whip out a paragraph or maybe 2, I do it as a comment. If its more than that, I use trackbacks, otherwise its all too easy to derail the original authors idea. Perhaps thats just something in the tech world though, education may well be different, but its how I and a bunch of other techies view the whole comment vs permalink thing.
Another idea might be a comment tracker, like discuss, commentluv, or others similar in nature. The idea being to carry on convos over a wide range of the blogosphere.
[...] else, the majority backfill the void and pick up the practice. As Jon Becker noted in “Greatly Exaggerated,” he was not buying that blogging is dead…and the interest I saw today demonstrated to [...]
To put it simply, as long as Google continues to index blogs and people search for/read blog content, they aren’t dead.
Sure, a ‘blog’ is a certain format that facilitates interaction and discussion, but the ‘End is Nigh’ folks need to remember that a blog is still a website.
Looks like Britannica’s on the bandwagon as well:
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/11/blogging-rip/
My point as this whole thing over the death of blogging has erupted is that blogs are maturing into adolescence (http://www.edjurist.com/blog/is-the-blogoshpere-dead.html). Even 538, a blog which I loved and read every day, has become something akin to mainstream media. The author there is making a lot of money off advertising and I am sure he was paid for his appearances on all the TV networks. Those TV network appearances subtly control him. I think blogs are moving or have moved past a lot of the personal writing/conversations into more professional writing and conversation. I don’t share all my thoughts because I protect my professional web identity, however small that is. As blogs have gone mainstream, all the old professional rules have begun to apply and my contention is that a lot of that more personal conversation has been pushed or voluntarily moved out of blogging into other domains like Twitter. Just like in e-mailing there is still going to be space for personal conversations and sharing, but a large chunk of blogging, like e-mailing, is going to be professional in nature going forward and more and more of the blogs we read on a daily basis are going to be professional in nature.
I don’t know. I think we are just at the beginning of this transition, but given that corporate and organizational powers have now taken wholeheartedly to blogging seems a pretty clear sign that something has substantially changed.
So, there I go writing a blog post that’s partly about conversations getting away from us and I didn’t even realize that Justin had written a similar and probably more meaningful post on the topic. I subscribe to Justin’s blog and read it regularly, but part of the seasonality aspect of the blogosphere for me is that I’ve had less and less time to read other blogs. So, my feed reader gets backed up regularly. Had I read Justin’s post, I probably would have commented there and maybe pointed my 7 readers to his “conversation.”
I get annoyed at people who respond to an e-mail before reading the whole chain of e-mails. I should start making sure the like-minded bloggers whose blogs I read haven’t already started a particular conversation before I start one.
No worries. It doesn’t matter to me where we have the conversation, it only matters that we have it. But, like Ron said earlier, it is a limitation of blogging that conversations develop and end sporadically in different places without any one person consciously causing it. I think that is no different from the analog world, but I think we assume that somehow digitally we would always be able to link our conversations, which clearly isn’t happening (it could be my fault, for instance, because I am not twittering so I might not be connected enough?). Blogging clearly has its limitations as well as its benefits and if we don’t resolve some of those limitations blogging is going to suffer. If we can’t figure out a sensible way to place a value on blogging in a non-monetary way, for instance, few academic professionals will have an incentive to participate in a meaningful way. I am thinking there might be more of a distinction between digital writing and blogging than I first assumed. I think digital writing might be more adaptable than blogging and blogging may be but a single form of digital writing that developed at the turn of the century. One question we will surely have to resolve in the relatively near future is whether we are going to come up with different names for different kinds of digital writing. My argument is that we should because I am tired of being lumped in with some of the junk that exists in blogging now.