MAGAZINE navigation:

INFO

ISSUES [currently viewing]

AUTHORS

SEARCH

Currently viewing:

Issue 5 > Blogging is dead? According to whom?

Blogging is dead? According to whom?

Hugh MacLeod looks at where 'blogging' has been and where it's going.

As a blogger, the last three years have been interesting ones, to say the least.

2005 was the year blogs came of age. For a lot of people around me at the time, the key moment was when Businessweek's now-legendary article, 'Blogging Will Change Your Business' made the front cover.

Suddenly we no longer felt like we were mere hobbyists and unemployed consultants typing away in our pyjamas, trying to prove how smart we were to a cold, indifferent world. Suddenly what we were doing mattered. Suddenly the 'big media' was an ally in our personal path to glory, not a hindrance.

2006 was the year of 'web 2.0'. Suddenly we saw sites like MySpace, Digg and YouTube get more and more attention. For the first time in ages you could utter the term, 'user-generated content' without all the girls laughing at you.

2007 has been all about 'Social Networks'. With Facebook leading the charge, suddenly who you know seems far more interesting to the journalists than what you know. Screw the nodes, it's now all about the network, People. All about 'the social graph', people.

We no longer worry about what we have to say, we worry about who's controlling our data. We no longer talk about folk we know, like and admire, and what they're up to, we talk about hot-shot startups and how many billions Microsoft is going to pay for them.

Of course, you realize this is all crap.

If you have something to say, then a blog offers a cheap, easy global medium in which to express yourself. This is as true now as it was three years ago, regardless of what the groovy cats in Silicon Valley may be up to.

Whether you have the time and the talent for it—'the skill and the will'—is another matter altogether. Also, whether other people will want to read it, is something one has little control over. But in both cases, the same is true for all other media.

So whether the now-famous Mark Zuckerberg sells Facebook for $15billion or $5billion [or something much less, fancy that], the fact remains—we all have our own lives to get on with, our own bills to pay. And that means interacting in the adult world of commerce somehow. Everyone has to get paid.

  next page »

Page  1  |  2  | all pages

« PREVIOUS ARTICLE  NEXT ARTICLE »

ISSUE 5 CONTENTS »

Currently viewing:

MAGAZINE > issues > 5 > Blogging is dead? According to whom?