Been thinking about Hugh MacLeod’s posts on this subject this week since Jeremiah Owyang brought it up here (and followed up here) and then BOOM here he goes again with another post about what blogging means AND TO WHOM in 2012. Agree completely and I’ll add that while I love Google+ and Twitter and various other networks, I’m still reading blogs with vigor. And a hearty amen to the conversation happening in other places than the comments. Twitter really unleashes their power, for better or worse, no?
And let’s be serious: I’m still following links back to blogs from Twitter. Not everything is being encapsulated 140 characters at a time. Aren’t you?
A short story: tweets like this one bear an eerie resemblance to discourse in the music blogosphere circa 2006. I’ll add that everything went pear-shaped in music blogging right around the time folks started to notice that it wasn’t fun anymore and that first was what mattered most. It’s what drove me to find something else to do as some of my favorite critics did the very same. Once everyone’s talking about what’s wrong, it starts to hurt the product. This is why I find folks like Maura and Chris and Daphne to be so inspirational: they’re sticking it out and still doing great work. If tech bloggers start to feel that the thrill is gone, I’d recommend checking out how Maura and Chris and Daphne are reinventing what it means to be a music critic in a Lady Gaga Pantsless in Paris world.
If you’re a tech blogger or aspire to be one someday, reach out to friends and colleagues who’ve written about music or food for pay online in the past decade or so. If nothing else, they can share more than a few stories about how Web 2.0 transformed the way we blog and how that process keeps iterating to new fields every day.