Is blogging dead?
Martin Fenner
Friday, 24 October 2008 18:56 UTC
Wired thinks that blogging is so 2004. The article by Paul Boutin starts liked this:
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.
David Crotty picked up this train of thought in his Bench Marks blog.
It’s a discussion we had before.
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Replies
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That article is so Wired-tinted! They are a little jaded over there, I think. The Wired audience is very different from the one on NN. They flame, they yell, and they pounce.
There are different forms of blogging, in my opinion – those that disseminate information and opinion, and those that engage in conversation. What we have on NN is the latter. It’s the reason I started blogging. It wasn’t to broadcast my thoughts (which are rarely that clever), but to find a group of like-minded people. I don’t need a million people to read what I have to say. I don’t need to be in Technorati’s Top 100. I just like having a space to express myself and to hear people’s responses. I think there are plenty of people out there who see things in the same way I do.
If one schemes for world and Google domination by running an independent blog, then yes, it’s likely that the train has left the blogging station and you will never reach the peak of blogging stardom. If, however, you just want a space and a community to call your own, there is no better way to get it than blogging. 140 character sputterings on Twitter don’t achieve the same goals (though they can be wonderfully useful and entertaining).
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Anna, I completely agree. There are probably very few (if any) science bloggers that currently earn a significant amount of money from blogging. I would think that in the future some science bloggers will be able to make a living out of blogging, but for most bloggers it will be a side job besides their activities in academia, publishing, etc.
Jörg Heber wrote a related post in the Publishing in the New Millennium forum: First boom and now bust for Science 2.0?. He wonders how the current economic crisis affects (mostly free) Web 2.0 tools, and blogging is certainly part of that.
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High impact factor blogging is only for a part of the crowd. My personal experience with blogs is very positive, and certainly not via my own blog alone. I feel that I have learned a lot of new concepts from this very Network.
I much liked the words of Grrrl Scientist in London, at Science Blogging 2008. Her point was that blogging, to her, was a sort of necessary tribute to the Society that had allowed her to pursue her interest for science. Very passionate. -
Maybe Wired itself has got stuck in 2004, and has not fully followed the branching evolution of blogging since then? Or maybe it is just trying to ‘sell papers’ to borrow a phrase.
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Blogging isn’t dead. I’m just rather busy today, is all.
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The problem is that everyone thinks that blogs should be a certain way. One person thinks a blog is an easy way to quickly update a professional website – another person thinks it should be a personal diary. Even within science blogging we’re having a mass communication problem about what a “science blog” should be. Should it be written by a scientist? Should it explain science?
The WIRED article seems to say that blogging, as in “I ate a cheese sandwich today and here is a picture of my cat” is dead, because it has been replaced by other personal information sharing sites like Twitter or Facebook. But blogs are still useful for other purposes, as their example of the top 100 Technorati blogs shows. They’re just saying that you can no longer become internet famous by writing about your dialy life. I’m fine with that.
I never liked the “blog = personal diary” definition. It’s short for “web log”, so it can be any log. Open Notebooks are blogs, in the pure sense of the word.
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Agreed, Eva – I think Wired is either out of date or trying to sell papers, or a combination.
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It’s funny, ‘cause WIRED has blogs. So it should be obvious that’s not the kind of blog they’re talking about…
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