Blogging is Obsolete, Uh Huh
I came across an essay in Wired a couple days ago that hit my BS meter – in the article Paul Boutin basically says blogging has become obsolete and irrelevant, and he could be further from the truth. What blogging has done has transformed and evolved, like all web technologies tend to do. Twitter, Facebook Updates and all the rest are simply new evolutions in the blogging process.
But does this mean you should give up your blog? Of course not. Much of the time you need the space to craft a well-written article or post; brevity is great, but not particularly conducive to exploring topics in depth.
And yeah, you’ll get your trolls at times,no matter what post-er, article-you add to your blog, and that’s why we have the power to manage our comments.
Blogging IS one of the cheapest forms of self-promotion available, but most people don’t have the knowledge to do it correctly, so yeah, there are a lot of dead blogs floating around, I’ll give him that.
But there are twice as many more that are still living, breathing entities that exist solely for the person writing the blog, and if people happen to stop by, great.
There are people like freelancer Meg Fowler, a fabulous writer who has a large following both on her blog and on Twitter, who have greatly benefited from blogging, even if its just on a purely personal level.
She also used the strength of her blog to showcase her writing and segued into online freelance writing. While she may not yet be internationally known, she wouldn’t be known at all if it wasn’t for her blog.
Yet he advises people like Meg to pull the plug:
“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”
Riiigght.
I do agree with him that pure text blogs are a thing of the past, increasingly people are turning to media like pictures and video to enliven their posts, and video blogs have quickly become mainstream.
Again, another evolution in blogging that ensures it won’t die, or become obsolete.
I have clients for whom a blog added to their site, optimized and used correctly, has bumped their rankings in the search engines by generous leaps and bounds.
Its happened with blogs I’ve created and written for as well, so the evidence that blogs done right, provided by handy-dandy analytics, is there.
And sure the blogosphere is getting crowded and half the stuff is obsolete, but its become self-correcting. Without competition, innovation remains shackled; the more crowded it gets, the harder people try, the more they shine and the more the dead wood floats into Google’s supplemental results ( we can hope).
Perhaps Wired should remove all its blogs-er, columns, since the whole idea is obsolete. I’n sure that would ho over well. Uh huh.
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