Two Slashes

One question I hear on occasion is whether I think blogging is a dead medium.  With the popularity of sites like Twitter (*cough*) and the recently-purchased Pownce, I can understand the thought process leading to such questions.

Most recently, the question came up in a discussion on a WordPress development mailing list where contributor Paleo Pat voiced his concern for the medium as a whole after having read an older article on Wired.  (My apologies for the link sandwich there, but I figured every breadcrumb needed to be covered.)

The Wired article essentially states that blogging is dead and that people who contribute or develop them are merely wasting their time at this point:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

The sheer number of platforms available (WordPress, Movable Type, hlscript (and the Justin Frankel/Cockos fork hl--), and Expression Engine, just to name a few) mean that just about anybody with a few dollars in their pocket (to pay for hosting, of course) can get set up with a blog of their own.  And if even the money is an issue, there are even services willing to take care all of the setup for free (a la WordPress, Blogger, and Vox, for starters) at the cost of some level of customization or fine-tuning.

Wired seems to complain that providing easier access and offering more choices are akin to lowering the standards required to put your story online, but I see this as enabling, not hindering.  Why shouldn’t somebody with a few intelligent things to say be able to get their voice out without having to spend three years learning to manage a webserver on the weekend?  Who decided that bloggers should have a diverse acronym dictionary of various web technologies like PHP, CGI, and FTP as mandatory requirements for putting their words online?

Also worth taking a look at are the uses of a blog compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr (as suggested above).  Flickr is a social photography site, not a place to rant about the trivialities of life, which makes that a poor substitute for the real thing.  Also, not everybody is a photographer; while undoubtedly some people will find a level of self-expression and communication through posting and browsing through images, that leaves a huge gap for people to be left out.  Facebook is a social networking site to keep in touch with your peers.  While some people tend to use Facebook as an off-scale blogging platform, “notes” (as Facebook refers to them) are not the real thing, and people tend to ignore them once their friends start cloning the childish surveys that people abandoned MySpace to avoid.  (The ability to post a new note for everything in a given RSS feed is a little amusing, too.) And Twitter…well, let’s just say that this post wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, and that some things are best left elaborated upon rather than compressed to fit such a limit.

Of course there are going to be people aiming to make money from their blog, but that’s just about typical of anything these days.  If you want to make money from your car, you would convert it into a taxi, correct?  Now, look at the number of cabs and compare that with the overall number of automobiles.  It’s a small ratio, right?  I don’t see how blogging is any different.  And on a related note (also mentioned in the Wired article), you’re going to have to deal with people who start riots.  “Insult commenters” are a part of everything, although sometimes they go by different names.  Is the point of a blog to escape them?   No.  You hear about all the people who throw paint at people wearing fur clothes; their statement may be physically destructive, so be happy you’re just dealing with a sharp-tongued snake.

Is blogging dead?  Not by a long shot.  It’s just that times change, and people need to learn to adapt to the available mediums.  Blogging isn’t the expression catch-all it once was, but it still has its purposes.

What do you think?  As usual, comments are invited (encouraged, actually).  If you vote, perhaps explain why you voted the way you did?

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You know, there’s something to be said about the feeling when you know you’re going to be handed a pretty big job.  Sure, there’s a lot of work involved, but you also have that big payout at the end to expect too.

Such is the case with an organization that had an idea of where they were going and what they wanted when they contacted me to do some work for them.  After a face-to-face with one of the higher-ups who would be making decisions, I agreed and took on the job.  I put in the work, and even took time out of my day to go to their meetings to present what I had done as progress.  I got feedback and regular communication, and overall things went along more smoothly than I could ever have hoped for; I still don’t think I’ve taken on a job that went together as easily as this one since. (continue reading…)