Ok, I’m not. But if I believed everything I read I would be. I can almost always find something fun and bloggable in my monthly Wired Magazine – but this month I am choosing to take particular issue with the article Kill Your Blog. I guess it had to happen at some point.
Kill Your Blog starts out with the bold statement, “Thinking of launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’re already got one, pull the plug.”
“Really?! REALLY?!?!” The article goes on to provide several reasons blogging isn’t all it used to be including the dominance of head of the tail “bloggers” like Huffington Post, the emergence of blog-like features on soc nets that make it easier/faster to share content, the rise of pay for post, “insult commentators”, difficulty penetrating search results, and the final nail in the coffin of their argument – Calacanis is out of the blogging business and Scoble only uses his for “long form writing.”
All of their points are true, but none of them – even added up – are enough to convince anyone in their right minds to “pull the plug” or hesitate to start a blog of their own. The rise of Twitter and the proliferation of Facebook and other platforms that make it easy to share brief updates or content has been great. As we all know, these tools allow you to stay up with friends, colleagues, and the social mediarazzi in a way I couldn’t by just reading blogs. However, after awhile it you start to miss “the real thing.”
Confession – I (unintentionally) all but stopped reading blogs, unless I found them through Twitter or Facebook links, for about a month. I didn’t feel like I missed anything at first – but it quickly made me realize the true value blogs provide. Reading Steve Woodruff’s witty Tweet on a keynote or a trend is great, but the value is in his deeper, intellectual analysis and posts. Knowing that Mack Collier is about to board a plane at SFO is a fun layer of knowledge, but has less meaning if I’ve only been staying up with him superficially and don’t know what's really been on his mind/blog for weeks.
Blogs are the foundation of many of our relationships (for social media, Moms, foodies, etc.). It’s how we identify ourselves, first connected with each other, and articulate our "big" thoughts and positions for evaluation by the broader community. “I’m a blogger” still means more than “I’m a Twitterer” or “I’m a Facebooker.” (Facebooker? What does that EVEN MEAN?!)
The last line of the article reads, “@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?”
My response? “@Wired: Get a grip. Not all want to launch next Gizmodo or Perez. Soc nets and microblogging cool, but community and depth still rule.”
You just made my day. Thanks for the kind words. I owe you a ketchup packet or 3 now!
Posted by: Steve Woodruff | November 07, 2008 at 06:57 AM
The temptation to ignore my Google reader is sometimes very, very powerful because it requires so much of my attention to engage. Twitter and my Facebook "feed" are the McDonald's of social media. The only reason why following most of these people on Twitter is enjoyable is that I do know the depth of their work or know them personally. So the necessity to eat a well-balanced social media diet still exists.
On another note - how sad that it was hard to find something to blog about in Wired!
Posted by: Virginia Miracle | November 07, 2008 at 07:54 AM
Back in July of this year, when Jason Calacanis announced his "retirement" from blogging, a lot bloggers followed suit and started asking themselves the question of the importance of the medium and blogged about it. Some agreed, others didn't. So this conversation has been going on for a while since then and I'm sure it has been going on before Calacanis.
Posted by: JayCruz | November 08, 2008 at 05:20 PM