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The Death of Blogging

When the “is blogging dead?” debate broke out, I thought: I am sure I read about this elsewhere, and it wasn’t on Wired. Ah, here it was: I read about it on Manchizzle blog, on 27 August, the title being precisely “Is blogging dead?” Only it had more to do with the low-down in meetings of Manchester bloggers, rather than the state of entire blogosphere.

Now, the Wired argument was such that today blogosphere has become a marsh, and every sane non-blogger will not start a blog, while every sane blogger will stop blogging. Furthermore, the article claimed that blogging is being submersed by Twitter and Facebook and various Social Media and Networking sites, whereby it is terribly hard for an amateur (and even professional) blogger to rise to the top.

The question is: precisely what kind of “blogging” is claimed to have died? With platforms like WordPress and Typepad allowing the users to have not only posts but pages, too, blogging is as useful as ever. Maybe in a couple of years I will be a web developer, building my own sites, but at the moment I take some pride in that immense technical learning curve that blogging has offered to me. So, blogging as a platform, when it allows the user to custom-build their own web site, seems to be quite lively.

Blogging as a form of online activity – this is a different matter, yet again, it depends on the point of view (and as we know, this point can be a major obstacle to seeing things). Ultimately, though – and this is what I have just written elsewhere – it is the purpose to which the blogs are written that is either dying or waning:

And here is the rub, and it is actually printed on the front page of WordPress.com: you are urged to start a blog “to express yourself”. This is true even for a business blog, for in the end a business that ventures into blogging is expressing something, be it their policy, product, or expertise. Well, what happens if someone expresses their “self” better than you? Or if the whole process of “self-expression” is too much of a labour? The beginning of a blog may be a technical question, but the blog’s sustainability rests entirely in one’s personal resources. And by that I don’t mean money or even the time you have to spare on your blogging efforts. What you know, what you remember, and how you use this, are the cornerstones of a successful blogging venture.

We are to discuss this tomorrow, 11th of November, at 6pm at the first Social Media Cafe in The Northern. There will be a panel of speakers, precisely on the subject, chaired by Sarah Hartley of The M.E.N., and, of course, there will be blogging afterwards (so again, what is dying?).

In the meantime, let me update you on the state of Los Cuadernos. I added the translation button, so please feel free to traslate the site into your native language. In fact, I’d really love you to do this and let me know if the quality is acceptable.

The email subscription to Los Cuadernos is now also available.

Now, back in August I said that I was thinking of adding categories to the blog, but wasn’t sure how this would work. If you now follow down the sidebar, you will see the result of my thinking. The ‘tags’ are assembled into categories by subject, and there are many of them, starting with Literature, Cinema, Music, Photography, and including Events Coverage and Special Projects, Renaissance, Art, as well as History and Fashion.

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