I’ve been singing the same tune as Hugh MacLeod in classes and at conferences for a while. If people are blogging less now it is only because so many other ways of being present and participating are available, each of them particularly suited for a particular kind (or granularity) of expression.
Twittering and Tumbling and Facebooking aren’t preventing people from blogging… they are creating new ways for people to express themselves in ways that blog engines– in all their variety– fit only approximately at best. Something that fits well as a Twit is going to be at best wedged into the stream of blog entries. If one can share something through a Facebook widget satisfactorily, then the impulse probably didn’t need to find its way (at that point) to a blog entry or wiki page.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people have mistaken a single kind of tree for the forest. I’m guilty of hand-wringing about the death of publishing when publishing continues to see explosive growth when what I am really unhappy about is the lack of publication of the writers and kind of writing that I have grown to have a particular interest in. Let’s forget about the dying of the blog and start paying attention to the incredible wave of lightweight, frictionless, gatekeeper free participation mechanisms that are now at our command for utterances large and small.
Does the word “blog” really mean anything anymore? When a term encompasses sites from BoingBoing to Borderland, and MetaFilter to Quantum Gravity in the Lab, how is the term useful? Saying “I don’t like blogs” is really saying “I don’t like the net” or “I don’t like things being published.” I doubt most who use those words actually mean that.
Blogging was never the point– participation, presence and publishing were. There’s a reason so many of us were blogging before there were any blogs and now spend time trying to make others see the publishing revolution that is at-hand and of far greater impact than the word “blog” can hope to represent.
I am going to use this one. I fid myself often calling WPMu and UMW Blogs an open source publishing platform not a blogging system. At a presentation over a week ago I started by saying “Don;t call it a blog, call it ….” What I was really looking for, however, was what you said here, thanks Chris -next time I wlll be better armed for my sermons
Just because I so enjoy flogging deceased equines, this a complementary liability of distinguishing “blogs” as some separate entity. Blogs are web pages….sometimes one handcoded page with infrequent updates, sometimes massive db backed cms systems. The term never did identify a single monolithic entity, but instead was a hip way to talk about doing what Alertbox had been suggesting all along—dynamic content gets more visits.
Wrong. To be a blog in a technical sense there must be, amongst other things, mechanisms for syndication and aggregation. There were blog-like things before there were blogs (I kept one), but they don’t fit the definition.
Blogs are not just web pages, nor are they dynamic web pages. As a technical item they have distinctions. My point is not about the technology, but the conflation of the term blog with a certain kind of CONTENT. Talking about “blogs” as if they are one kind of thing in terms of CONTENT is wrong-headed, something I’ve said from the beginning.
The only thing consistent about Alertbox and that tired, expired hack Nielsen is that he is so consistently WRONG about technology since 1998 or so. The quicker he is forgotten the better.
blog: short for “web log”, i.e., a log on the web. QED.
And I forget how vehement you are about Nielsen. For me, well, I’ll never forget the dude who introduced me to the term, “informavore.”