HTTP 404

November 3, 2008 at 11:54 am · Filed under Geek Culture & Tech

There’s a very interesting article in this month’s Wired about the death of blogging:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. 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. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

That said, your blog will still draw the Net’s lowest form of life: The insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack is sure to scribble beneath it, “Lame. Why don’t you just suck McCain’s ass.” That’s why Calacanis has retreated to a private mailing list. He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters.

As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase. @WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

I do disagree with the main idea of the article though. I have been blogging since 2004, and it was way cooler then, and it attracted a different audience than it does now, but that’s doesn’t mean it should die. It just means that it matured, and unfortunately in this world, anything that loses its youthful, rebellious spirit as it grows up just falls into the cycle with everything else, and that’s what happened with blogging. That doesn’t mean its bad… it just means that its different. And it’s going to happen to Twitter, Facebook, and every other kind of currently “hip” media.




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  • Ahmad Al-Sholi

    I haven’t been around blogs for that long, a year or so maybe.. what got different in your opinion? I am interested in knowing how such an important platform changed in your mind as a dominant blogger yourself.

  • Chris

    Nonsense. The whole idea of enabling random people on the internet to post comments is to enable the “global discussion”.

    You can always change the people who can post comments on your blog to “only your friends”. I am sure there are ways to make your blog visible only to a select group of people.

    Given the above options, I dont understand the author’s rant.

  • http://blog.sweetestmemories.com Qwaider قويدر

    I agree with Chris. I also think blogging as a medium is barely starting to mature right now, and just like everything on the verge of maturity, it goes through a lot of violent reactions. Although, I don’t see blogging ever maturing more, although the word “blogging” appears in just about every major media outlet and newspaper every single day. And likely to continue to do so as this dialogue continues
    What Authors, and writers don’t like about blogging is the fact that ordinary people actually “Talk back”, instead of spitting at the book and throwing it out of the window.
    Some people consider bloggers Elitist, while writers still consider themselves the custodians of true writing skills, therefore being elitists themselves.
    One thing is certain, not everyone can do it. Either because they have no means/resources to do it, or don’t have the “itch” to write and express through the written word

  • http://halalhippie.blogspot.com Halalhippie

    Not to worry.. blogging will become the usenet of the future where the select few will talk about old times, and the trolls will have moved on to whatever is the new fad. Nothing wrong with getting old.

  • http://www.black-iris.com Nas

    i have to agree with roba, but i also think instead of the word “mature” which indicates a life cycle where death is an inevitability, i would say it has “evolved”. the field of blogging has expanded to be all-inclusive. new technologies and new “medias” are being integrated in to the blogging platform everyday. it remains topical, it remains current and their popularity is only increasing along with their legitimacy.

    i think it will continue to be a staple of the internet as much as the search engine. but, much like the search engine, we might see a reversal to more simplistic, straight-forward, minimalist, and specialized blogs, as opposed to the contemporary clutter.

  • The Web

    I simply feel that commenting on a blog -sometimes- is like talking to the blogger about the post (like talk face2face and opinion sharing) except that, there is no: [face expressions, voice expressions, hands (Tashbeer) expressions- and although there are many people having difficulties expressing themselves & their opinions with 128 ASCII characters & am one of them] and so on.

    Sometimes a post on a blog with a related comments may look like a discussion forum.. will discussion forums die ? i don’t think so, so the blogs, blogs are more social, (They will Increase your social bar {The Sims} in today’s [turning-into-lifeless] routinic people ,new-tech blind-mad society.

    When we used to visit cousins and relatives, dads and moms used to talk about their things, (Politics, tabee5, their children,etc), and when visiting someone new, the only way to start a discussion is :
    keef shayfeen hal jaw ballah ? aw recently’s more discussion stimulating phrase:
    keef hal 3′ala ballah ?

    i think blogs may create a Hyper Link (not in the geeky meaning) with a status code of 200 (OK), that is, if a planned or unplanned meeting with the blogger and commenters is held [physically], you’ll have a lot and a lot of things to talk about [in and out of blog topics] not only ‘weather’ to start with.

    i don’t like the overwhelming overweighted overWEBed technology to Scatter someone’s web-life, like thoughts and pics are spreaded between facebook, hi5, myspace, msn spaces, flickr, and get restricted with their designs, unless you connect (some or all) of them neatly with the web -self designed- center :
    your blog.

    wal sho 7akeet, leesh heek ?

  • PH

    But that’s exactly where the problem is, it is “hip” media, meaning that it resembles some sort of trend that will wear out with time, or until something even more “hip” comes around. With pop culture, it seems that edginess loses the battle to what “the cool kids are doing”.

    My personal issue with blogging, is that there is no personal development. You are basically writing to people who will most likely agree with you. After all, they read your blog because they agree with most of what you have to say. Or there is the occasional stumble-upon from somebody who clicked on your blog – as part of the search engine results, because they are, albeit on a superficial level, looking for exactly the opinion that you had expressed. This means that there is little to no mental challenge, as few readers would tickle your level of intelligence, or spark up some interesting argument. sometimes if you do try to argue, the owner shows you the door (happened with me quite a few times, which is testament to how annoying I can be really! lol). Another thing is that there is absolutely no privacy whatsoever, I find that writing in a private forum is much more rewarding than writing to a bunch of strangers, especially in Amman!

    The other problem is that there no accountability or responsibility, as opposed to mainstream media, where a public opinion requires both credibility and responsibility, and also yields accountability.

    On a Jordanian level, I think blogs will thrive in number, but not so in quality (except on a corporate level, or when a blogger writes in an almost professional manner). I think this is due to the fact that we still bear this small-village mentality, where your opinion and level of intellect and intelligence are not as important as being “nice”. Similar to what happened to the planet thing when Abu shreek and a gay blog got banned. When you have to be “nice” there is little room for generating creative content and providing a refreshing way to look at things, or asking questions that are pretty much leftfield and spacey. So I am kinda stuck up and elitist, but so what?

    I think that professional blogs with a personal touch (blogs that provide insight, critique, analysis and personal opinion to current events, instead of just reporting on events and copying links and whatnot) are likely to stick around. As well as corporate blogs (because they put the firm directly in touch with the consumer, who will most likely bear less inhibitions than when complaining over the phone, or face-to-face). Another form of websites that I really like, are public websites that allow personal contributions (much like Don’t Panic, Pitchfork, Red Room, Identity Theory, ffffound, 9rules, imdb). At least these blogs have some of standards for both content and writing styles; only people with something genuinely interesting to say get to write, it minimizes riff raff and trash!

    talk about a long comment. Having said all this, I wouldn’t mind blogging again, but I’d definitely choose a very different way to go about it!