(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)
I just started reading Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe,” on my spiffy new iPad,* and came across this little gem:
I don’t know what the future of book looks like. To figure it out, I’m doing some pretty basic science. I’m peering into this opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it sits in the year 2004, and I’m making a perturbation. I’m stirring the pot to see what surfaces, so that I can see if the system reveals itself to me any more thoroughly as it roils. Once that happens, maybe I’ll be able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe—just maybe—I’ll get to the bottom of book-in-2004 and beat the competition to making it work, and maybe I’ll go home with all (or most) of the marbles.
So here we are: half way through 2010.
What’s changed?
Everything. Nothing.
People are still reading books on paper, still reading books on line, and we’re still being inundated with new technology. Like the iPad, with which I started this blog post. And iPhone applications like Foodspotting and Foursquare.
For example, in 2004, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been thought of. MySpace was growing rapidly, and blogging was really taking off in it’s “second stage.”
By 2007-2008, blogging was “dead.” The party had moved to Twitter, Friendfeed and the like.
In 2009, MySpace is “dying,” and blogging all of sudden becomes huge again, with high profile folks like Scoble “returning to their roots” as bloggers.
Now, in 2010, I’m predicting we’ll have another sky-is-falling round of “blogging is dead” as Facebook doubles in reach again.
Can you imagine?
1,000,000,000 people on Facebook?
Crazy!
I’ve already starting reading that Facebook is going to kill Google, kill blogging, and in general, own the internet.
But I don’t believe it, and here’s why.
Too often in the past, these prognostications turn out to be not just wrong, but promoted by people with a vested interest in the outcome. Dig a little. Who’s the person making the claim, and why are they making it? And just what are these folks selling?
This is my bet, based on seeing blogging “die” two or three times now:
Blogging as we know it will continue – and grow – as a medium of communication.
It just won’t be sexy.
My vested interest? I’m in the blogging business.
(And proud of it!)
This isn’t entirely accurate. What’s more accurate is that I’m in the written content production and promotion business.
Right now, at this very moment, websites are the fastest way to get a lot of information into the public arena really fast, and “blogging” software is the fastest way to get that content on a website.
And that’s going to be true for quite a while.
Because your commitment to other platforms such as Facebook imply no commitment from Facebook to you. You’re just renting a little space on their webpages. Ask Robert Scoble how bad this can turn out. Can you make a public stink big enough? I can’t.
In contrast, when you purchase hosting, a domain name and build a web site (with or without a blog), you have a lot more control over what you choose to put on the web.
Treat blogging as a long term commitment to content production, and you almost can’t go wrong.
We’ll talk about the massively over-used term content production in future article.
Meantime, what do you think? Should we all just give it up for Facebook? Why or why not?
*The quote for this article – and the start of article itself – were done on the iPad.
Dave,
You make very good points about why blogging isn’t dead (or dying) but the biggest reason to reject predictions is because they are based upon linear projections of trends. They assume that nothing new ever happens. I worked with forecasters for my whole career and the best of them just assumed that tomorrow would be like today only more so and built in a fudge factor to cover them when things change. Black Swan deals with this nicely.
Ralph´s last post ..Switch – How to change things when change is hard – Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Ralph – totally agree with that: predictions rarely go a little bit wrong.
I think the key is looking at the underlying activity, which doesn’t change that much. In this case, it’s writing and publishing. Every, single person is doing more of it than every before.
A slight digression…
Part of the value of reading the classics is learning that there is very little new under the sun, at least once you get just enough altitude.
Two examples from Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” come to mind:
There is very little in current discussions of either 1. copyright law or 2. public education that wasn’t thoroughly dissected in London. In 1776.
(While it may seem crazy to us, London in 1776 (and through the next several years), was much more embroiled in domestic politics than interested in that little dispute in the colonies thousands of miles away.)
Blogging as we know it right now is fundamentally a fast and public way to get words into view. That’s the point.
What we choose to do with those words is a slightly different discussion. Which is exactly where the Black Swan lands.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Flipboard Blogging- Are you ready for the next wave
Well, I say… Don’t give it up for Facebook!!! What a waste that would be!
Facebook can’t replace blogging. Facebook isn’t blogging. Facebook is a disjointed conversation among a whole bunch of people on any given day, it’s worse than Twitter.
Besides Facebook relies on Twitter and blogging to feed it’s stream. It has become a catch all. A place that relies on other places for it’s content. If the other places go away what will you be left with.
I personally avoid Facebook because it gives me a headache.
Long live blogging!
Yolanda Facio´s last post ..Marketing 101- I Hate Taglines…There- I said it!
You’re right, Facebook does rely on our content. And they have it set up such that you almost have to play it their way.
I’m keeping my Facebook presence fairly light. I suspect a lot of the people who are my natural kind of people will be doing the same.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Guest Post blogging – The other side of the story
So glad you said that Dave about Facebook. So far I’ve not spent much time there. Between writing articles for my new blog which I enjoy doing, tweeting which I also enjoy and reading posts on sites likes yours – not much time left for anything else at the moment!
They have been predicting the demise of the printed book for sooooo long and booksales continue to go up regardless of the latest new gizmo being promoted.
I love reading and I love blogging so may they long continue to be in the forefront of our community we are building on the net.
I for one am learning heaps from experienced bloggers and marketers alike and just occasionally I go on a site where I can join in and add something to the mix . Other times I’m asking questions and learning so for me it’s all a win-win situation at the moment and hopefully will continue to be :-)
Patricia Perth Australia
http://www.lavenderuses.com
What she said ;)
I was going to add a whole lot of supporting stuff but Yolanda’s right. I create nothing new for FB. It’s just a collecting pool and a noisy, messy one at that.
El Edwards´s last post ..Animation super star and all round good guy FF @CraigWoodhams
As I understand the TOS, anything Facebook hosts grants them unlimited license rights.
I may be wrong about that.
I hope I’m wrong about that.
But with their demonstrated willingness to experiment with privacy, it’s too big a risk for me to take with my content. I’d rather be wrong and not have my content on there than to risk it.
As always, great ideas here.
My first thought is, FB will grow until it’s supplanted by the next thing. And it will be. But it will have fundamentally changed the way we think of the internet.
From now on, no one will think of being online without peer interaction. What we do will be shared with those we’re connected to and vice versa.
My second thought is, while blogging never died it has made some transformations. Are ebooks another form of blogging? Books that add chapters every week like a television show, automatically downloaded to your favorite reader?
As has been said, the future is going to be more about the things we don’t see coming than the ones we do.
Siddhartha Herdegen´s last post ..Communication Means Taking Risks
Siddhartha, you have nailed it 1, 2 & 3.
1. Facebook really has changed how we see peer interaction. I’ve given up all pretense at anonymity.
2. Blogging has changed a lot since the late 90s. At least what we understand as blogging. It’s always interesting to me to visit really technically oriented blogs, because the commenters are years behind the curve. Sure, they may be writing today’s hot code, but they’re commenting with IRC handles, fake email addresses and without linking to a web site.
Those things just weren’t done 10 years ago. Hardly at all. Doing such things would get you branded as a “self-promoter.”
3. The future will not only be stranger than we can imagine, it will be stranger than we can imagine. Yet, people, I think, will remain largely the same, in terms of drive, motivation, etc.
Good to see you back, thanks for stopping by.
Argh! Not Facebook!!
Facebook is an out-of-control frat party, complete with drunken idiots and leering fools. And what does everyone do when the beer keg is empty, when the party is over?
They go home. To their blogs, to their words, to their Twitter friends. Sure something new will hit the ground running, sometime soon, but Facebook will not replace real content and actual conversations.
Hugs and butterflies,
~T~`
PicsieChick´s last post ..This photo- these words- the cure for wildfire smoke
I detect a certain lack of enthusiasm for Facebook, eh?
Yolanda really has it right, I don’t see anyone creating much content for Facebook, just aggregating content.
Whatever happens, it’s bound to be interesting.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Upping Your Social Media Trust Factor Who’s in your circle
Dave you make some great points and I hope you are right. I am a Facebook hater. Well, hate is a strong word, and I do of course have a page there… so maybe facebook “disliker”.
Anyhow unless Facebook does start to produce real content, content and blogs will be king for me.
How do you like that IPAD, I have been thinking of getting one.
Steve Scott Site´s last post ..A Period of Transition
I like the iPad so far. I’ll like it even better when I figure out how to write a complete blog post on it.
Here’s what I really want:
* Connection to my existing 3G account with iPhone. Currently they require a separate account for each device, and it’s mandatory for iPhone. Which means they can s^H never mind. It’s extortion. I don’t like it.
* Offline apps for creating content. These likely exist. If they don’t, they will soon.
That would go a long way to making iPad a slam dunk.
Curation is the new creation, Dave. We owe it to ourselves, to the future of the webs and the cerebral cortex of our children’s children’s dogs.
Needless to say there’s too much internet. I think if you laid every pixel end to end you’d need to assemble all the content on the internet, it would just about cover Roseanne Barr’s navel.
I may have a post to extrapolate further. Oh, yeah, I do – it’s just down there a little…
Dave – the key is how we define the term “curation.”
Semantic web technology assures us digital creation is viable. But I don’t believe it.
My hunch is that if you could express curation mathematically, useful curation would require human intervention to be useful for humans.
My concept of developing expertise in microniches in blogging (nod: Liz Strauss), marketing, or any other endeavor has a curation component. Someone with deep expertise will have a favored suite of documents and technology “known good.”
I don’t believe computers can make this leap.
Semantic web can help, but it can’t solve.
I think blogs still have a very very long way to go before they are as culturally stable/solid as books. Let’s face it, how many people read books and how many read blogs?
I think one thing is for sure – people will always be people and some of them/us will always look for ways in which to express our thoughts and pass them on to others. The rest is just platform.
Anne´s last post ..How to Find Blog Sponsors
My current conception of blog posts and pages, or really websites in general is that they are ephemeral.
Because they are.
Having dealt with the Microsoft web site for well over a decade, their practices provide a de facto rule of conduct: pages can change at any time, for any reason. And a 404 page is simply a great way to direct people into a marketing funnel.
Changing this behavior is probably not possible. There’s too much economic pressure against it.
This is partly why academics tend to sneer at the web as a source for information. When you make a claim, you need to back it up. And having the claim backed up on paper, with a volume, issue and page number, keeps everyone (literally) on the same page.
Not so with a web page.
Now, it could be so, but w would have to accept real revision histories. And I don’t mean the fake revisions stored by WordPress. Those are just versions.
We would also need a way to cite references.
And this is where MOST ebooks fall apart completely: there are no page numbers, no versioning, no revision history, nada.
This matters.
Suppose I want to direct someone to one of Samuel Johnson’s bon mots. Can’t do that with an ebook, there’s no page numbers!
It will be interesting to see where it ends up. The current model for ebooks delivered by every single publisher (except one, *cough*) is more or less flat or lightly formatted text. They are treating ebooks as, essentially, disposable entertainment rather than resources.
Now, the great thing about websites is that they can be kept up to date. And they should be. But as canonical resources, I don’t think any website is going to put John Wiley & Sons, or Addison Wesley or O’Reilly and Associates out of business any time soon.
As my friend Joe would say, as publishers, the medium doesn’t really matter as long as we’re publishing something on some channel. Blogging might change, but we’ve got our foot in the door now, and it doesn’t matter where it goes, we’ll keep it in.
Nathan´s last post ..I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
Exactly.
I agree with Nathan and his friend. It’s all about publishing content. FB isn’t really a place for that. I seriously dislike FB, I’m interested in building a presence online, in building my online business…I really am not interested in connecting with grade school friends from 30 years ago!
Huh, did I just date myself…
FB is not a publishing platform. Great conversation here!
Yolanda Facio´s last post ..Marketing 101- I Hate Taglines…There- I said it!
When I publish my content on my platform, I just feel all warm and fuzzy inside…
Blogging isn’t about to roll over and die in the face of twitter, facebook, et al. Books did not disappear when other media came along: radio, cinema, tv, the internet, etc. They are just more outlets for people’s freedom of expression, not replacements.
Totally agree.
But I’ll put money you seeing more “blogging is dead” headlines.
Dave…just testing…sorry
Here, here! Let the “sky is falling types” run around squawking their dire predictions all they want.
Blogging is not dead yet and I really don’t see it suddenly disappearing any time in the near future, sooooo…
Keep on blogging. And don’t pay any attention to the doomsayers. After all what year was the world suppose to end? Oh yeah, depending on who you ask…
All of them!
Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella´s last post ..How Dofollow And Nofollow Links Impact Blog Success
“All of them!”
I love it!
Hi Dave,
It makes me laugh to hear people say “blogging is dead.”
My guess is that the people saying this are the ones struggling to get their blog off the ground. It’s not dead. It’s just a saturated area, which is great for readers. More competition will inevitably increase the standards of those most read blogs.
In a time when everyone is going SEO crazy and internet marketing mad, web content is incredibly, incredibly valuable! And bloggers contribute so much to the Internet.
Blogging to die? Nah… I doubt it! :)
Stacey Cavanagh´s last post ..5 Stalker-Like Tendencies Facebook Has Instilled in us ALL!
Standards are going up.
It’s going to take time to educate readers though. So many people coming into this so fast, they haven’t developed the skill to evaluate what’s good and what’s garbage.
But they will.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Flipboard Blogging- Are you ready for the next wave
This is the third time I try to post here….hope it works this time! As a newbie to blogging, I just see it getting bigger. From visiting this site and other sites by experienced bloggers I am learning heaps and as I become more a part of the blogging community hopefully will be able to contribute more to comments in posts. I haven’t done much with Facebook; use Twitter a lot more and find this great for connecting to ppl in my niche and also for sourcing good articles and finding yet more good blogs to learn from.
Patricia Perth Australia
Patricia, it takes time, and for a while, the more experience you get, the more you may find you think you ought to learn.
Just don’t try and do everything all at once, especially when you’re starting out.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Building from Nothing- not Building from 5-000
I totally agree. Facebook came, and facebook will go, just like other social networking sites. And blogging may be not so ‘trendy’ so all shallow people will stay in facebook, and those who do have something valuable to give will build communities around them (and their blogs)
We’ll see. There’s a lot of noise about how “everything is moving to Facebook.”
But I’m staying right here, and evidently more than a few of my readers feel the same way.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Blog Post Engineering 072 ready to roll
I completely agree. Blogging is never really going to “die”.
But on the other hand, facebook IS growing fast. really fast.
I recently wrote an interesting blogpost and got 4 comments on the blog. I posted the same as a facebook note and got nearly 20 comments apart from numerous “likes”. Maybe facebook and blogging will one day come together. Who knows?
Ashoka, you need a headset hottie for your gravatar.
I know I’m going to have to do something about Facebook. Just don’t know when.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Blog Post Engineering 072 ready to roll