Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, wonders if blogs have jumped the shark. I wonder if the phrase “jumped the shark” has jumped the shark, but I digress.
Picking up on this is Kansas City-based creative generalist Jeremy Fuksa.
It seems there’s a better way to share information. I hardly read RSS feeds anymore. I get all my links and information from tweets. All the blogs I truly care about tweet links to their posts, so RSS reading has almost fallen by the wayside for me as well.
So, you tell me. Am I jumping the gun here, or have blogs as we know them begun to lose their relevancy?
I’ll try to answer that. Linking to stories on Digg or another site isn’t the same as commenting on stories, or writing original pieces on one’s site. And microbursts on Twitter are not comprehensive enough to replace more in depth posts on one’s site. It seems to me that these things work best, when they work together.
For most people’s purposes, I think you’re exactly right. However, I think there is a certain emerging group of people where my theory suits best. That group is pretty small (and admittedly I’m trying to figure out if I’m part of that group), but it’s out there. And, for them, the model of information consumption is dramatically shifting.
Not following you Jeremy.
I tend to learn about blog updates via Twitter too. (I don’t like FriendFeed or RSS because they just remind me of all that I’m missing.)
But then I go and read the actual blog post, especially if it’s one of the dozen or so blogs I read regularly.
So how does that make them irrelevant?
There are too many blogs out there, that’s true- not everyone has the ability to write in an entertaining manner- but that sort of fallout was bound to happen.
I think the better written blogs (and AdPulp is one of them) will continue to survive.
Alan,
I agree with you 100%. The better written blogs will survive, and I’m thinking that the better question for me to have asked is “are blogs still relevant as the main source for people’s information?”
For me and many others around me, it’s becoming more obvious that blogs are slowly taking the back burner in lieu of shorter, more succinct bites of information. If I see something that I feel deserves a deeper dig, I can do so. Otherwise, I just got the summary for what I need to know and can move on about my business.
Of course, I have to also remember that I, along with many of us in the industry, are early adopters and that the mainstream still has a way to go before they have the potential to shift to this mindset.
My question of irrelevancy may not be worth much in the short term, but just like all web trends, it’s one that’s worth keeping in the back of our collective minds moving forward.
Remember, we’re insiders. The world is still turning onto blogs — many are media properties now. And they get indexed by search engines very well. A quick 2 cents. I hope blogs survive. It’s the last bastion of fully-spelled words.