Blogging is increasingly growing as a means of internet communication. Whether for personal or business needs, blogs now considered the new email.
Blogging is hard even if you’re a natural or trained writer. It’s difficult to write and write well on a consistent basis, let alone every day. I used to say that blogging isn’t for everyone. Now, I think that blogging like I do isn’t for everyone.
I think blogging is maturing more than declining. For every blog I’ve seen end, 10 more have popped up in its place. Blogging isn’t easy. Whereas Twitter is about concentrated real time conversation, blogging is about dialogue that is both distributed and extended. Perhaps the biggest problem is that Twitter has almost become an alternative to blogging and in doing so sets up a potential competitor for bloggers.
According to Paul Boutin, who ironically writes for the Sillicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag , blogging is out and being replaced by the next generation of social networking tools – Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. In a recent WIRED Magazine article, Boutin says that the mainstream media has taken over the blogosphere with professional writers, who break the big stories these days. Blogging is a whole different hi -tech field. Learning to blog is like learning to ride a bicycle. You have to first put one together, then learn to ride it so you can fall off and hurt your pride, then pick yourself up and do it all over again. To the extent that blogging is truly a First World phenomenon, it’s likely the opposite sort of cause-and-effect relationship than is implied in this post. It’s not that blogging can cause intellectual development, but that it’s the result of such development.
We start to cultivate a real community, we witness its power in action, and our belief in the validity of blogging is deeply solidified. Blogging is one element that acts as a social network. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, and more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud. Slow Blogging is a reversal of the disintegration into the one-liners and cutting turns of phrase that are often the early lives of our best ideas. It’s a process in which flashes of thought shine and then fade to take their place in the background as part of something larger. So, while I can’t speak for others, I wouldn’t overestimate its influence on bloggers and the way tech blogging is done.
Technorati says its findings indicate that blogging is now mainstream. I’m not so sure. But blogging is alive and well for those that are willing to commit to it. And yes, as you mention, you can reach a point where other methods of communication might be better suited for much of what you want to communicate. As you write, blogging is a wonderful tool that many writers have embraced.
Video blogging is now even bigger. Videos are a terrific opportunity for you to be able to put a face on your business unlike any other media. As far as collaborative blogging is concerned, this is win-win. Blogs can be private, should you want to keep your thoughts behind closed doors.
Apparently blogging is contagious within institutions. Once tried, museums find other ways to use the technology. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. But blogging is hard money. People blog for money because it’s easy to get started, not because it’s easy make a profit.
Compared to the studied seduction of the novel, blogging is literary pole dancing. Anyone can stand naked in the window of the public’s eye, anyone can twitch and writhe and emote over the package that was not delivered, the dinner that burned, the friend who forgot your birthday. Blogging is changing the way we communicate with our target market, clients/customers and fellow business owners. Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly, openly and honestly with your customer.
Blogging is like music, you’ve got to play it the way you feel it and you’ve got to give your own interpretation to the material. To the extent that those assumptions mirror reality, then blogging is not a fad. On the contrary, it could have a lot more potential for growth.
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October 18th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
A thoughtful and insightful article. I know the truth of what you’re saying because I’ve had a personal blog for over a year now. And I feel what we’re doing at Triond is blogging, too.