Is it just me, or are blogs becoming yesterday’s news? I realized today that it had been a month since I updated my blog here and thought about what to write to keep it fresh. It dawned on me that perhaps what I was trying to do was fit my lifestyle to the tool instead of the tool helping me with my life. Let me explain.
Blogs were great back in the days when pretty much all the content came from the “big companies”. Blogs were a way for people to have their voice heard and to actually use the web interactively instead of just one-way. It was no longer acceptable on the web to have a static web page in which you blasted out information about your product/company/etc and only update it once a year and have no way for the readers to interact with you and the content. Blogs allowed us (and businesses) to update their sites non-stop and for discussions to be two-way. They were the first step into the Web 2.0 world.
Today, blogs are just a pain to maintain – at least from my perspective. It’s so much easier for me to Tweet my current thoughts via Twitter in 160 characters or less, or to update my Facebook status (and even then I’m wondering is Facebook is getting to be a little 2000 and late). In a nutshell, I find that Twitter is giving me everything I need without taking up a lot of my time. Even better, its allowing me to find the topics that interest me via a real-time search engine. The important stuff bubbles to the top because of the re-tweeting taking place, and those people I trust the most I follow so I can always see what they have to say.
Now before I say blogs are dead and gone, let me state I do think that blogs still have a purpose. After all, you can’t dive very deep into a subject when you are limited to 160 characters! I think blogs are becoming the website instead of being a part of the website. Take my site for example, sure I have this “blog” if you will on the front page – but really the entire site is a blog. I’ve just adapted it to display the information I care about. I might not update it for a month, or I may update it every day for a week – but the idea here is to share information that I want others to add to and use over time.
Compare this to Twitter where I am interested in sharing information and collaborating in real-time. A year from now (or even a month from now) I am not interested in what happened on Twitter 30 days ago – I only want to know what is going on right here and right now. A real-time search engine.
Blogs at one time were the public squares of our time – where everyone went to shout out their thoughts, opinions and advice. Today that role has been taken over by Twitter – and instead of a lengthy speech we hoped a few people would read now have bullet points that we shout out to the crowds in short, digestible chunks. Sort of like moving from a Microsoft Word document to a PowerPoint slide if you think about.
#1 by CourtneyWalsh on June 3, 2009 - 12:30 PM
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Nicely put: I was trying to do was fit my lifestyle to the tool instead of the tool helping me with my life.
You talk a lot about the power of real-time search so I wanted to point you toward http://www.OneRiot.com – I think you'll like it to find what is going on right now from across the web incl. Twitter, Digg others. Let me know what you think and thanks for the post! -Courtney
#2 by technogranma on June 4, 2009 - 2:08 AM
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Yes Robert but where do most of the twitters take you to? Apart from websites? Why folks blogs of course! And as for Facebook, its the one site that I often feel I could do without. Yes blogging is time consuming simply because you are adding more words to it, but is twitter enough to convey your message? You blogged this didn't you? How could you have expressed these thoughts without putting them on this page and being able to be more detailed in doing so! Blogging is still the main area in my opinion for most of us.
#3 by Robert Stinnett on June 4, 2009 - 9:24 AM
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I'm not advocating the elimination of blogs — like you said, in this case the only way I could express my opinion was through a blog entry. However, I think that for the majority of communications taking place bogs are not the best place nowadays. They require more thought and time than most of us are willing to dedicate to it. Our society is moving so fast that I argue people just don't have time to read these things anymore on a day to day basis — only on those rare occassions where we occassionally have something important to say.
#4 by Robert Stinnett on June 4, 2009 - 2:24 PM
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I'm not advocating the elimination of blogs — like you said, in this case the only way I could express my opinion was through a blog entry. However, I think that for the majority of communications taking place bogs are not the best place nowadays. They require more thought and time than most of us are willing to dedicate to it. Our society is moving so fast that I argue people just don't have time to read these things anymore on a day to day basis — only on those rare occassions where we occassionally have something important to say.