In the last two months, both Seth Godin and Paul Boutin, who writes for ValleyWag and Wired Magazine, have announced the death of blogs. The most damning symptom, they say, is the weak showing of single-author blogs in the Technorati top 100 list and the growing interest in micro-blogging and social networking platforms like Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook.  The web is changing, becoming faster and more social, but that’s no reason to bury your blog.  Here are five ways your blog can thrive in the next few years:

1. Make your blog a platform for long-form articles that remain relevant.
2. Become a source for specialty or niche content and aggregate existing content in new ways.
3. Focus on individual conversations and leave the community-building to Facebook and Linkedin.
4. Fulfill a personal need in your life beyond ego-stroking.
5. Remain adaptable and refine your blog based on its strengths in the face of change.

More below the jump…

Are blogs dead? Seth Godin makes a concession that Paul Boutin omitted in favor of being provocative (or just inflamatory): it is the personal blog that is passing away. For the purposes of keeping up with friends and family, social networking services are easier to use and purpose-made to enrich our social lives (and earn wads of cash for the keepers of the ‘walled gardens’). What Boutin misses is that many blogs are not about building a cult of personality.  Godin points out: “The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.” There is precious little room on Facebook or Twitter for depth or permanence, which is precisely where a well-written blog has the upper hand.

Boutin’s article has been roundly criticized, so I won’t spend time rehashing what has been said so well.  Instead, I’d like to make a few predictions about where the successful blog is going in the wake of blog mania.

1. Use blogging for long-form writing on topics with a lifespan of weeks or longer.

Be it micro-blogging or the darling of social news sites, where the most hyped forms of new media fail is in their depth and permanence.

The last time I tuned into a tweet feed was during the presidential debates when blogger Chris Cillizza was using the medium for live coverage.  It was interesting at times, but mostly disappointing–the text equivalent of someone who won’t shut up during a movie–the comments rarely provided valuable insight and at worst were a distraction.  What’s more, micro-blogging is about what’s happening right now.  Trying to look back at entries from a couple months ago is not very easy on Twitter because the simplicity of the medium precludes the sort of organizational tools like tagging, categorization, and permalinks that make blogging robust.

I find that the same lack of permanence and depth is often true of the most popular forms of social news such as Digg and Reddit.  Popular items tend to be very short and often shallow because the pace of social news media is so much faster than it was in the hayday of Slashdot and Kur5hin.  Once a link has slipped off the first few pages, it can be difficult to find again.

Micro-blogging (and the equivalent pieces of social networks, such as Facebook’s status updates) serve their specific purposes very well.  They are great for keeping up with friends or even managing a network of professionals.  Social media is also here to stay–despite my quibbles, Digg remains a part of my daily surfing experience.  However, niether of these things are going to eclipse the blog as a platform for publishing thought-out and long-lasting articles.

2. Specialize on your expertise and act as a content aggregator.

If blogs are indeed dead, it is the death of the literal single-author “web log” (in the sense of travelogue).  Social news media (Digg, Fark, etc) and multi-author blogs (boingboing, ars technica, Daily Kos, etc) have locked-up the market for the combination of news and neato links.  Single-author blogs simply can’t keep up in the generalized interest areas served by the giants in the Technorati top 100.

Rather than using your blog to report on everything you find interesting, focus specifically on a niche where you have specialized knowledge.  You’ll be much more likely to succeed if you write content that isn’t likely to be found on many other sites.  This is also the best way to get traffic from the large sites.

Another area that has come in vogue recently is aggregating blog posts or ‘meta blogging.’  These articles appear constantly on Digg–they are most often lists of lists.  An example could be “5 Resources for Web Designers” that then links to five different blog entries that are themselves lists of links to tutorials, free fonts, etc.  Show off your knowledge of a niche and collection of worthwhile links by re-packaging them as a toolkit or list of resources.

3. Focus on conversation more than community.

Blogs were early, successful examples of ways to build a community online.  Blogrolls were like the friends list of today.  Social networks have co-opted the successful community-building components of blogs.  For those interested primarily in social interaction or community building, sites liked Linkedin are far better than blogs.  The other barrier facing building a community around a blog is the lack of regular readers.  With the improvement of webzine-style blogs and social news sites that aggregate everything that’s fit to read on the web, there is less chance that readers will subscribe to and regularly read a blog.  Instead, certain entries may gain significant attention and a large one-time audience while others remain obscure.

Rather than trying to tailor the whole site around a community of regular readers, instead focus on creating meaningful conversations with a post or group of posts.  The back-and-forth between different bloggers and their readers is not going away anytime soon, and the blog format allows both the fast pace of micro-blogging (via comments) and the more thought-out trackback responses from peer bloggers.

4. Have a personal reason for keeping a blog beyond ego.

If the only reason you blog is for the perceived audience, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.  Readers will come and go with your varying success in promoting your site, writing well, and writing regularly.  Your blog should serve some purpose for you that is important enough to justify your time.  For me, I enjoy having a single place to collect and refine my thoughts about the issues surrounding my career, and I think that having a professional blog will be an asset in promoting myself to potential clients and employers in the future.  Any benefit I can get from attracting readers into a conversation around an article is just icing on the cake.

5. Keep perspective in the face of hype and don’t be afraid of change.

The choice to bury your blog should never be based on the hype of the moment.  Blogs are certainly not ‘dead’ anymore than email mailing lists or forums (both of them practically antique mediums) are dead.  As new technology and new ways of packaging and sharing information arise, the unique strengths of each of these old media will only become more refined.  Following the hype and trying to use only the newest media is both exciting and frustrating.  I, for one, would rather learn from the early adopters’ failures than be the one failing.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to say goodbye to your blog if you find that another media will better serve your needs and interest.  Are you blogging mostly to keep up with friends and family?  Have a look at Facebook instead.  Do you want up-to-the-minute community engagement?  Look at Twitter.  Interested mostly in organizing face-to-face events?  Linkedin.  Have an occasional link you want to share?  Digg.  But if you want to write original, thoughtful, and longer articles that have some amount of permanence, blogs are still the best way to go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Electronic Culture. It has been viewed 6169 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!