On the Shoulders of Giants Or; A Rambling Discourse on the State of Blogging
Is the big, blue bird a blog killer?
The New Year is past, a lot of resolutions have a died a quick death and everyone has had a good look at the year previous. One topic that seems to be on the minds of a lot of folks is twitter and the effects thereof.
The verdict … blogging is dead.
Microblogging is the new black, nobody wants to read anymore—not at length anyways—and Twitter is the HOT.
Well, I won’t dispute the latter sentiment. But is blogging dead? Not in my world. I haven’t watched TV for 5 years, I rarely watch movies and with a house full of children, the Mrs. and I rarely go out. Blogging is a main source of entertainment, and one I find much more fulfilling than these other forms of media. So I say long live blogging.
And I believe there are many others who share my opinion, enough that ‘old school’ blogging isn’t going away anytime soon. And I maintain that if you do something well, you will be successful.
Storytelling is a lost art
In times past, families would entertain each other with stories verbally. Sometimes they were acted out. Current technology has been built in such a way that this habit has been replaced and the talent has been mostly lost.
In fact, the very technology that claims to bring people closer together in fact takes us farther apart. Now don’t get me wrong—it’s cool that I can meet/talk/chat/start a business with new people all across the world. But if these virtual, psuedo relationships come at the cost of real physical interactions with the people around me, than something is wrong. The here and now, face-to-face interactions in my life cannot be replaced by Tweets and AIM chats.
And for now, blogging, although based on technology, allows people to tell a story of more than 140 characters.
Mediums change, but a good story never dies.
Radio gave way to television—not a lot of people would dispute that. And yet radio is still here. And more recently, the world wide web has had a large effect on various mediums. Print media took a big hit with the widespread availability of the intertubes, and physical album sales, cable TV and movie rentals have decreased as well. But they still exist.
We’re now using the Internet in ways we weren’t five years ago (or even two years), but I’m not buying into the idea that what we did five years ago no longer matters. I still use email and I still read blogs. And whether it’s fiction or non, a blog lets the author tell a story.
And I yearn for good stories.
Blogging is not always about the community
Building communities, interconnecting digital relationships is the domain of social networking. Now blogging can at times have similar results, but that is not the primary intent. The content of a blog is first and foremost beneficial to the author. Whether a person recounts an event, shares expertise or lists what he/she had for breakfast, the main benefit is to the creator.
A blog post can be read by no one, a million people, or all points in between. If a community grows from this, it’s a by-product.
Behaviors are different on twitter
And lastly, here is a point that has hit me recently—following someone on twitter is a lot different than reading their blog. I can like your writing, but be turned off by your personality on Twitter. Or vice versa. People act differently on Twitter—they are more free, impulsive and think less about their words on Twitter. Generally, it seems like people are more real in this medium.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Not all personalities mesh well and Twitter seems to allow a person’s personality to be more obvious. I’ve heard some the big names making statements similar to this recently:
“I’m surprised how many of my Twitter followers don’t read my blog.”
Perhaps this is only natural when your writing style and your Twitter ‘voice’ are not congruent.
My apologies for this rambling discourse with tenuously related points. This was merely a collection of thoughts with a central theme—the comparison of blogging to ‘micro-blogging’.
Was there a point to be made here? Only this: I love to Twitter, but it can never replace what I do on my blog or what I get from others.
Update: TWR reader and Smoking Apple member Preshit Deorukhkar brought an important point to my attention: I’ve used the Twitterific bird icon in my post image above rather than Twitter’s own icon. Doh! When I read his email I realized I’ve come to associate that icon with the Twitter service itself. Great observation—thanks Preshit.
I’ll leave the image as is though, as the post is focused on the medium rather than the tools used to access said medium.
