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comment by jaggs
jaggs  ·  4019 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Jason Kottke: The blog is dead, long live the blog

Such a load of twaddle, I'm afraid. Sorry, but the blog continues to perform amazing service as a specialist format, alongside other so-called dead formats such as forums. It's where people get the real information, as opposed to stupid pictures of kittens (which admitedly are very entertaining).

This post by Kottke is the equivalent of saying radio is dead, long live radio. Twaddle. :)





mk  ·  4019 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I should have also linked to his own post about the piece where he expands a bit on his twaddle:

    I am not generally a bomb-thrower, but I wrote this piece in a deliberately provocative way. Blogs obviously aren't dead and I acknowledged that much right from the title. I (obviously) think there's a lot of value in the blog format, even apart from its massive influence on online media in general, but as someone who's been doing it since 1998 and still does it every day, it's difficult to ignore the blog's diminished place in our informational diet.

    Through various blogrolls (remember those?) and RSS readers, I used to keep up with hundreds of blogs every day and over a thousand every week. Now I read just two blogs daily: Daring Fireball and Waxy. I check my RSS reader only occasionally, and sometimes not for weeks. I rely mainly on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Hacker News, and Stellar for keeping up with news and information...that's where most of the people I know do their "blogging". I still read lots of blog posts, but only when they're interesting enough to pop up on the collective radar of those I follow...and increasingly those posts are on Medium, Facebook, or Tumblr.1

Like him, I follow far fewer blogs than I used to. However, I am probably aware of just as many, if not more. It's just that I usually land on them by way of aggregator. I do think medium lacks in that, unlike an individual blog, I am almost never aware of who wrote the piece.