Sarah Horrigan takes a Wired article — Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 — to task, and rightly so, since it announces the death of the blog, no less. At least people had the decency to wait 500 years before announcing the death of the book (they’re wrong about that too, of course), but to do the same for the blog a mere decade or so after its beginnings is quite absurd.
Paul Boutin has produced a piece of drivel here, and mainly because his assumptions about why someone would want to maintain a blog are just too ridiculous for words. For instance:
“…scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones…”
And:
“…cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers…”
What sort of strange netherworld does this guy inhabit? Obviously that weird world where, if you’re not in the top 100 you’re nobody, nothing. It’s just such a ludicrous place to be.
Why do so many in this sphere seem to believe that every decision in life has to be a binary decision, an either/or choice?
And, the strangest thing of all, that this piece of hogwash should appear in the magazine edited by Chris Anderson, he of Long Tail fame. Maybe someone should take Mr Boutin aside and explain the concept to him. Whether you are in the top 100, top 1000, top million, or not, really doesn’t matter a jot. Whether you have an audience of 1 or 100 or 1000 or 1,000,000, you have a reason to blog.
So keep on blogging, and chuck this piece of drivel in the virtual bin.
As Somerset Maugham said:
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
Works for blogging too.….
Technorati Tags: blogging, sarah horrigan, wired, paul boutin, chris anderson, long tail
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