In a recent (online for about twenty hours old at the time of this being published) article in Wired Magazine, Paul Boutin urges people to stop blogging. Why? He posits that blogging has passed through the trend phase and that it is now dominated by traditional media outlets in vague electronic disguises. The Huffington Post, the New York Times, even Fox News. These outlets have resources, they have professional writers, and most importantly, they have money. And Boutin makes a good point, check out Technorati – the top bloggers are all sloppily disguised online magazines. If you believe Boutin, your blog will get lost in the flood, overlooked by Google and readers alike. The camaraderie that once dominated the blogosphere is gone, or so says Boutin, and with it the avid reading of each others blogs and the all important act of backlinking has seemed to die with it.
Yes, the average blog has lost that “new tech smell” that saw blogs become a cottage industry so new and unknown that for what seemed like forever CNN and MSNBC would pull bloggers on air to interview them about stories. Yes, blogging has faded from the spotlight, replaced by microblogging and entrenched social networks. Yes, the major media outlets are all blogging too. But this isn’t any reason to stop.
Boutin’s suggestion was to move towards more specialized services – in particular Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. These services, he argues, do what blogs fail to do – they allow for the easy upload and sharing of multimedia and the rapid dissemination of ideas that once escaped the blogosphere. However, Boutin has over simplified a couple of serious points. First, all of these services can easily integrate into the vast majority of blogging platforms. Second, these services are specialized to the point where they do allow for much else. Flickr allows for photos (and if you’re a heathen, video), but not much in the form of elboration on said photos other than tags and a description. Get wordy and you’ll lose the effectiveness of your photo. YouTube is in the same boat is Flickr, only it’s restricted to video. And I’ve said time and time again how I feel about comments on YouTube. Twitter? Yes, I love this service, however, its primary strength is also its greatest drawback – character length destroys the ability to elaborate. Conversations that stretch beyond a quick series of replies are a pipe dream when you have more than a handful of people whom you follow. And Facebook? It attempts to integrate all of these, and does so with marginal success. But, Facebook’s uniform atmosphere doesn’t particularly allow for any of these tasks to be done well or with any measure of originality.
Guess which one is the blog
A blog, however, allows for these various, disparate services to be combined into one highly usable, highly customizable location. YouTube videos can be embedded, allowing for them to serve either as the focal point of an argument, or for an intellectual expansion. Ditto for photos from Flickr. Twitter serves both as a means of promoting one’s blog content, but also as a means of generating new content. I, for instance, place in my last twittering near the header of my website. In this, I know I’m not alone.
Yes, being a blogger is different today than it was back in 2004. The gold rush seems to have ended. The community that was the blogosphere has largely been overrun by the likes of marketers and spammers, killing the ability to have a post instantly linked to, generating back links, and in turn, PageRank in the eyes of the almighty Google. Today, simply having a voice is not enough. Your voice must also have a message. The modern blogger is equal parts writer and marketer, and today’s bloggers are promoting themselves as a brand.
Thus, the key to building a good blog is the same as building any other good website. Know what you want to say, say it well, and then position yourself to actually be successful. Today’s web has a lot more tools at it’s disposal than it did back in the Wild West of 2004. These modern tools – social bookmarking, RSS aggregation, social news aggregation, and everyman SEO – do a lot more good for a site than they do harm. The trick is knowing how to use them.
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Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.