Blogging Is Not Dead
October 24, 2008
Hello. Cliff Jones here reporting from the twitching corpse of blogging.
Actually, reports of the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated. It’s interesting to read about this in newspapers, too. It’s like horses talking about the demise of cars. Things co-exist. Horses are still around. And like newspapers they are more for fun than function, they make a lot of mess and French people eat them.
Where was I? Newspapers have a place in reporting of course, and many have excellent websites, but blogging. It is not dead.
Just because we have Twitter and Facebook, doesn’t mean that writing is going to shrink to brief updates, any more than text messages have killed the novel.
Anyone saying blogging is dead is missing a crucial point. People have Facebook and Myspace pages and Tumbler areas and Flickr pages and Twitter updates and all that stuff, because it’s easy to have and it’s low maintenance broadcasting and it’s fun. But bloggers have these outlets too but they still keep blogs because they do something else.
I draw a line between the blogs and the other stuff because their blogs are not for quick updates to people I know. Cliff is walking the dog does two things. It bores people I don’t know, and it also tells people I don’t know that I am not in my house. Facebook also would connect the people I don’t know with people I do know who might not want to know that people I don’t know can get to know them.
People use Facebook in different ways, but this is just the way I use it. It’s complicated but it keeps things simple.
Blogs are the best of informing an audience in an engaging way, the rest are for sharing things in a convenient way. Sure, blogs are not convenient, but ask any writing blogger if twitter has replaced their updates and they will say no.
8 comments
Damn, I sent flowers and a nice card as well. Typical.
God doesn’t exist either, now, according to the bus, so it’s just as well.
In related good news… were you aware that Abe Vigoda is still alive, and walking the streets of the Upper East Side?
(Sadly, though, I’m not sure Abe Vigoda is aware of it)
When my great grandfather went off to fight in World War 1 he never came home and my great grandmother never learnt what became of him. Today our young men and women serve overseas yet in an instant they can reassure their families they’re safe.
A baby is born and a proud father sends a picture instantly to grandparents so they can rejoice in the miracle of a new life.
Our machines roll across the surface of alien worlds and through their eyes we can see wonders beyond the imagination of earlier generations. And we have Twitter so I can pay to tell total strangers I’ve gone to take a dump and there’s no toilet paper.
Twitter is a means of expressing ( and reinforcing ) both your universal humanity ( in that we all have these little annoyances in our lives) and your individuality ( they aren’t all the same for everyone, and their reactions are a bit different ) in 140 characters or less. Enforcing brevity upon such things is a way to distill them down to their essence.
Or something.
Katy is: eating pizza. Good pizza.
Ok no but seriously. I don’t really understand how anyone could say that blogging is dead because of twitter. Are books dead because of headlines?
Memo to self: read original post before commenting.
Leave a comment. Play nice. I will turn this blog around.