On behalf of blogging,

October 21, 2008

On behalf of blogging,

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.

Bonus link.

Blogging, Blogroll, Journalism

Posted by:

Doc Searls

8 responses to “On behalf of blogging,”

Sean Reiser

October 21, 2008 at 10:08 pm

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.

Reply
vanderleun

October 21, 2008 at 10:59 pm

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

Reply
Don Marti

October 22, 2008 at 1:05 am

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.

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david cushman

October 22, 2008 at 3:44 am

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. 😉

Reply
Doc Searls

October 22, 2008 at 5:16 am

Thanks, Don. Good point about “the tool of choice for big-picture coordination between projects” for the free software community.

Reply
Maria Reyes-McDavis

October 29, 2008 at 6:15 pm

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.

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Franchise Guide

May 25, 2009 at 7:06 pm

You know, I think you’re right as well. I don’t think twitter is for “organized thoughts”, while their posts may be relevant, it lacks the “flow” that comes from blogging. I will note that I read an exceptional article in The New Yorker regarding the value of twitter. When a plane crashed into the Hudson River, it was first noted on twitter, then on blogrolls, then on popular newswires, and finally it was written in the paper the following day. I think it just speeds up media and truly answers what is happening right now.

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Jeff Guenther

October 15, 2009 at 3:24 pm

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.

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On behalf of blogging,

8 responses to “On behalf of blogging,”

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