I call Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 a crock.
Paul Boutin wrote it. He’s an old friend, and I hate to crap on anybody’s work. But he’s wrong about this one. A sample from my reply:
| As personal journals on the Web go, blogs have no substitute. Twitter is fine for 140-character micro-postings, and for the ecosystem surrounding it. But micro-posts are not journals. Flickr is great for posting, tagging, organizing and annotating photographs, and for allied services such as creating groups and the rest of it, but it ain’t blogging. Facebook has some blogging features, but at the cost of forcing the blogger to operate in a vast hive of non-journalistic activity — and flat-out noise. |
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/10/21/on-behalf-of-blogging/trackback/
October 21, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Sean Reiser
Came to the same conclusion earlier today (http://seanreiser.com/content/blog-dead-long-live-blogging). I agree with the concept that I’ll never compete with the media companies, that’s not why I do this. I secretly suspect that Calacanis retired from blogging because competing with them and was a victim of his own success.
October 21, 2008 at 10:59 pm
vanderleun
Facebook boosters might want to consider this droll estimate of Facebook’s carbon hoofprint:
===
Hence on an estimated ballpark – Facebook daily consumes 924,000 KiloWatt-Hours with per capita of 3.08 KWh . Annually the per capita figure would be 1124 KWh /year or equivalent to emission of 0.75 ton of green house CO2(Carbon footprint) which is half of NY city’s carbon footprint.
=====
Other amusing stats at
http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog/?p=487
October 22, 2008 at 1:05 am
Don Marti
Doc, I remember your earlier point about blogging as answers to email, only public. If you’re going to write an answer anyway you might as well paste a copy into a blogging tool.
Every communication tool seems to have a boom, a bust, then a set of steady users. In the free software community blogging seems to be the tool of choice for big-picture coordination between projects — you can’t be on the mailing list of all the projects whose work interoperates with yours.
October 22, 2008 at 3:44 am
david cushman
I still love the blog for one simple reason – it is the least silo’d of all the ways we can form communities of purpose on the web. Facebook, twitter, flickr, huge as they are, just don’t have the sheer connection potential of blogs (via rss and search).
I won’t be giving up on mine until someone comes up with a better way of sharing my metadata.
October 22, 2008 at 5:16 am
Doc Searls
Thanks, Don. Good point about “the tool of choice for big-picture coordination between projects” for the free software community.
October 29, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Maria Reyes-McDavis
Doc, I agree with david, blogs have an amazing ability to form purpose based communities. With the technology now available in open-source platforms like Wordpress – blogs, as they are, contribute to the online community in ways Twitter and Flickr never will.
October 15, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Jeff Guenther
The noise-to-signal ratio of Twit-land, Farcebook, etc., is huge. They have some use, but can’t compete with a garden variety blog. Too much non-information. TMNI.