Blogging = Freedom
Reports about the death of blogging are highly exaggerated. Doc Searls, from his Linux Journal blog, dishes out some righteous piece of mind about the vogues that are purportedly displacing blogs out of fashion and out of mindspace.
Paul Boutin is a friend. I love the guy. I also think his latest Wired piece — Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 — is a crock. Two reasons. One is that blogs are fine, even if they seem passé. The other is that blogs are free and open, while Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to varying degrees are not.[..]
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.[..]
Freedom matters. Independence matters. Not being utterly dependent on any single service provider not only matters, but is an essential virtue too rarely visited and too lightly respected.[..]
Blogging at its best is free speech working in open spaces. That virtue persists, no matter how many slums get built in blogging’s hosted services, and no matter how passé it seems at the moment.
I too love Flick.r, delicious, Twitter, Google Reader, Friendfeed and all the other cuddly, spacious and proprietary Web 2.0 time wasters (besides Facebook, that is), but home is where my blog is; and it’ll be a free home for as long as I can breathe -and write- free.
Anil Dash: Dear tech blogosphere: Paul Boutin blogs for a living in a competitive market, and just said you should stop blogging. Guess why he said it?
See also:
- Valleywagger attempts to assassinate blogs; social networking and microblogging is where it’s at (Blog Herald)
- Blogs are so over, Wired magazine says (Mathew Ingram)
- Reports of blogging’s death are… (Scott Rosenberg)
- Techmeme thread
