Today saw the most spectacular example of link bating in a long while when Paul Boutin wrote in Wired that blogging is so 2004 and that Flickr, Twitter and Facebook had all but killed it. Normally one would ignore such silliness but stupid utterances do have a purpose in that they encourage us to articulate things we assumed were obvious. So here goes.
First off, Boutin sees the blogosphere as a pyramid where the top bit is where everyone wants to be, as indicated in this handy diagram for those unfamiliar with pyramids or the concept of top bits. You never know.
This is a very old fashioned view of the media landscape. It assumes an objective value judgment and measure of “success” for individual blogs, one which I don’t recognise. I think it’s most useful to look at this map of the Internet (taken from here):
Here’s the thing. It’s not about numbers of readers. It’s about the quality of those readers and the relationship you have with them. 200 passionate, dedicated followers of your blog (who in turn have their own blogs with passionate dedicated readers) is so much more valuable that 200,000 grazing readers who you never connect with properly. And cultivating the former takes time and dedication, regardless of how well funded you are.
On to point two, that Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are killing blogs.
This one is easy. Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are blogs. A blog is a collection of pieces of content displayed in date order with an option for categorization where linking and conversation are encouraged and enabled. That sounds like Flickr to me. It definitely sounds like Twitter. Facebook, yes, to a certain extent if you ignore the walled garden. Hell, a YouTube account is essentially a blog.
Don’t mix the medium with the message. Blogging is a platform. That it’s evolving into new forms of discussion and distribution is a positive thing.
“Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times” say Boutin. Only if they want to. I know I don’t want to. I want to connect with people who I have something in common with and learn from and with them about the world. Blogging, like other social platforms from the bonfire to the pub, enables that.
I don’t know whether this is obvious or not, but I do know you said it SO well. Great use of illustration.
Yes. Love that deep space illustration.
The ones that all talk about monetization are several gazillion light years away from my little cosy sphere of influence.
What you gotta learn is that the ‘old media’ love fads – building em up, the breakin’ em down. Blogging was their favourite fad actually in 2007 – but now it’s “so 2004″.
There was a very amusing discussion on Radio 4′s Today programme this morning, where John Humphreys totally ripped the p**s out of a couple of lame-ass journo bloggers (one of whom claimed “I like to tell the world about my sick cat”), commenting on this story. He sounded incredulous at the idea of Twittering and ‘tweets’ and blamed it on the deficit of human attention spans in a derogratory way that only he could get away with. Not sure home tongue-in-cheek it all was but worth checking out if you can.
As you say, it’s not about the what but about the who and the why – there are as many reasons to write (whether you call it blogging or whatever) as there are writers.