Mon, 27 Feb 2006

Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!

They don't get. They never got it. It's not "blogging for dollars" - and most of us aren't blogging for fame. We blog for the same reason we keep journals, write novels that never leave the desk drawer and mix our own CD's. We blog to express ourselves - the fact that our musings can now be easily published and widely disseminated at very low cost is ancillary. I'd keep this blog going if I never got another reader, and I daresay that 99.9% of the other bloggers out there feel the same way. Money and fame are the [potential] icing, not the cake.

Blogging differs from traditional, mainstream journalism in that it's intensely personal, in the sense that it's not driven by markets or the needs of others, but strictly by an internal need on the part of the blogger to, well, blog.

And that's not a bad thing.

'Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging,' Jason Fry writes on WSJ.com, responding to a recent wave of blog-doubting that includes a Gallup poll and a Chicago Tribune editorial entitled, 'Bloggy, we hardly knew ye.' Fry says blogging might not fly as a business, but 'the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money won't mean the end of blogs -- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits.'

(link) [Slashdot]

/Technology | 4 writebacks | permanent link

On 2/27/2006 17:46:14
brainwise wrote

On 2/27/2006 21:16:24
pablo wrote

mailto:editor@roundrockjournal.com

On 2/27/2006 21:30:53
brainwise wrote

On 2/28/2006 07:10:06
Arwin wrote

Spam meets blog

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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