{"id":1474,"date":"2008-07-22T10:39:32","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T15:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/07\/22\/blogging-dead-or-the-message-becomes-just-another-medium-or-being-beaten-to-death-by-croutons\/"},"modified":"2008-07-22T10:39:32","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T15:39:32","slug":"blogging-dead-or-the-message-becomes-just-another-medium-or-being-beaten-to-death-by-croutons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/07\/22\/blogging-dead-or-the-message-becomes-just-another-medium-or-being-beaten-to-death-by-croutons\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging Dead, or, The Message Becomes Just Another Medium, or,  Being Beaten to Death by Croutons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"pic\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cote\/2620339582\/\" title=\"The News in the Hill Country - Fredericksburg Standard by cote, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3126\/2620339582_a622efa003.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" alt=\"The News in the Hill Country - Fredericksburg Standard\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFeeling like I have to expand an idea out into some 3000-word treatise just adds a weight which suddenly turns the whole thing into another fucking task I have to add to the pile and then explain to my poor girlfriend why I&#8217;m spending another evening fiddling with my website rather than fiddling with her. <i>&#8212;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.auscillate.com\/post\/189\">JK<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hey! What better way to start a post about blogging than with a classic, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yellow_journalism\">yellow<\/a>-blogging headline?<\/p>\n<h2>Time Tested Blogging Research Methodology: Anecdotes<\/h2>\n<p>Blogging is not really dead &#8211; you&#8217;re reading this after all. Rather, it seems to have moved beyond <a href=\"http:\/\/sagecircle.wordpress.com\/2008\/07\/11\/thinking-about-gartners-hype-cycle\/\">the Jackhammer of Disillusionment into The Heartland of Dry Counties<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Every week &#8211; sometimes daily &#8211; I come across another declaration of &#8220;hey, I&#8217;m not really blogging (much) any more:&#8221;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Our <a href=\"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2008\/07\/08\/doomed\/\">own Stephen O&#8217;Grady commented on it several weeks ago<\/a><\/li>\n<li>In <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.stackoverflow.com\/2008\/07\/podcast-14\/\">episode #14 of Stackoverflow<\/a> (a fantastic recent find for the podcast stack, <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.stackoverflow.com\/index.php?feed=podcast\">you should listen to it<\/a> &#8211; it&#8217;s like the smart\/NPR version of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drunkandretired.com\">DrunkAndRetired.com<\/a>) they go into the demise of blogging quiet well. Joel&#8217;s outline of the &#8220;problem&#8221; is the best so far.<\/li>\n<li>And then, in the non-biztech world, I keep encounter <a href=\"http:\/\/www.auscillate.com\/post\/189\">comments like that from my old friend Josh Knowles up in Gotham<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/news.cnet.com\/8301-13505_3-9962935-16.html\">Matt Asay re-discovers books<\/a> rather than let <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200807\/google\">Google Make Him Stupid<\/a>. (Somewhat related: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mevio.com\/shows\/?mode=detail&amp;episode_id=119238\">commentary on newspapers a good package for consuming news<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To my mind, this ads up to people having less fun producing and consuming blogs.<\/p>\n<h2>Lean Blogging<\/h2>\n<p>In truth, what I see happening more is a shortening of the form. Rather than using blogs as a medium for publishing articles, people are more interested in writing up short notes. This is beneficial for mass-blog readers like myself: shorter content is easier to consume.<\/p>\n<p>Keeping your content short and yet useful is difficult. Interestingly, the idea of &#8220;hyper-text,&#8221; the foundational philosophy of the web, if you will, should make this easier by having all sorts of &#8220;click here for more detail&#8221; links. But, that never really caught on. When not relaxing &#8211; that is, working &#8211; people want a beginning, middle, and an end.<\/p>\n<p>This is one reason why Twitter is so popular. Much of what you need to know (feel free to go <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pareto_principle\">Pareto Crazy,<\/a> here if you need numbers instead of anecdote-clains) can be reduced to a headline with a link to read more. Yeah: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/cote\/\">Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2>Little Johnny Has a Blog<\/h2>\n<p>As the Stackoverflow boys point out, what&#8217;s also happening here is that blogging as a medium has gotten sanded down into normalcy. Everyone does it as just another way to publish. You can hear the word &#8220;blogger&#8221; dozens of times on Sunday morning political talk shows.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re getting that point <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2007\/03\/14\/sterling_sxsw\/\">Bruce Sterling pointed out last year<\/a> and mentions frequently:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good,&#8221; Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. &#8220;Well, no, actually. They don&#8217;t.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s overly cynical, but it gets to the point. Blogging is pretty much just a medium now. Don&#8217;t take that the wrong way: it doesn&#8217;t mean that any effect the idea of blogging has had has gone away, it means the message part that it brought is now &#8220;normal.&#8221; Like newspapers &#8211; no one obsesses about the newspaper (or printed books, even) as a medium for communication: it&#8217;s just the news and people thinking in print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Feeling like I have to expand an idea out into some 3000-word treatise just adds a weight which suddenly turns the whole thing into another fucking task I have to add to the pile and then explain to my poor girlfriend why I&#8217;m spending another evening fiddling with my website rather than fiddling with her. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,35,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-the-analyst-life","category-the-new-thing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}