Blogging is dead? Hardly.
It seems it’s been all the rage this week to ring the bell on the death of blogging. The A-list bloggers are dropping off of Techmeme, Calacanis quit blogging and switched to email (what!?), and Scoble is more into Friendfeed. So yeah, blogging must be dead right? It’s old fashioned! Out of style! It’s going the way of the telegraph! Right? Wrong.
I stand by my statement that blogging, like anything else, is just a vessel for delivering CONTENT. Just like TV, Radio, or even Twitter, or Friendfeed. It’s a method of getting information from one person to a group of people. Just because the quote “A-Listers” have gotten bored with the system, doesn’t mean that it’s in any way fundamentally flawed. The only major problem is simply the level of noise in the ’sphere. There are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of blogs on the net now, and it’s become harder to break through to the surface to find your readers.
To me though, this “problem” really is a blessing in disguise. It’s a system that naturally eliminates people who don’t deliver good content. If you copy and paste crap from one blog to another, and fill your page with nothing but ads, chances are no one will ever see you! You’re really forced to do a better JOB than the other guy. If you want to get and keep readers, you have to consistently be on your game. This is why more and more of the Techmeme leaderboard is made up of major media outlets. Like it or not, major media outlets are REALLY GOOD at delivering entertaining content. It’s what they DO.
So what about the solo blogger? The honest truth is, most solo bloggers don’t make millions of dollars from their blogs, and most anyone who did would be snatched up by a major media outlet in a hot second! Solo bloggers aren’t going anywhere either though. Most of us do this for fun! We enjoy writing, and it doesn’t really hurt our pocketbooks to keep it up. I’d hardly call spending 8 dollars a year on a domain, and 7 bucks a month on hosting a financial burden. We aren’t going anywhere. If you like what we write as solo bloggers, that’s fine! We love that you guys come to read us. It’s awesome to get recognition for what we do. If not, you can go elsewhere. It’s ok.
The biggest problem I think the A-listers are having, is that they really enjoy conversations more than they enjoy delivering a story in a journalistic sense. People like Scoble and Calacanis LOVE to talk to people. They want to have an intimate connection with the people who read their stuff. With some A-list sites getting hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month, conversations just aren’t possible anymore. Blogging at that scale just isn’t good for having a conversation with your readers. This is why they’ve all gone on to sites that are more social network than they are content delivery. This is great too. They should absolutely do what they feel they should do. But to call blogging dead is I think taking it a bit too far.
You don’t see sites like Engadget or Techcrunch calling blogging dead. The numbers of hits they get on a daily basis has elevated them to the position of trusted news sources. People go to them for updated information on a constant basis, most of the time BEFORE they go to traditional media. Stripped to the core, though, the sites are nothing but blogs. You don’t see those sites shutting down and moving to friendfeed. It’s just silly. Like I said before, blogging is just a way of delivering content. If you’re good at it you’ll have readers, if not, you won’t.
Jason Calacanis likened himself to Bob Dylan at Newport in 1965, bringing out an electric guitar at a folk revival. Unfortunately I don’t think that holds up. I wouldn’t exactly call the acoustic guitar dead.
Like any instrument, blogging has it’s place. It’s just a matter of people playing it the right way.
Tags: Blogging, Calacanis, Friendfeed, MSM, Scoble, Techmeme
