In “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which I’ve perused through but never read to completion, Milan Kundera writes:
One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.
Kundera may have written about novel authors, but there’s little parallel with blog authors and the communities and connections they spawn.
Photo credit: Robin Hamman @ Flickr
…which leads me to question those who say blogs are dying.
Is The Economist correct in its view of Jason Calacanis, Ev Williams, and other high-level technologists that blogs went mainstream and are dying, echoing recent commentary in Wired by Paul Boutin that wannabe bloggers should give up?
Is Harvard Business Review former executive editor Nick Carr correct that blogs are lacking personality and experiencing a midlife crisis, echoing similar commentary by Chris Brogan that people are writing less and shifting to podcasting and video blogging?
Are Helen Duffett and Duncan Riley on the money that blogs are shrinking and blog networks are dying? Or should we agree with Alan Patrick, Steve Garfield, B.L. Ochman, and Mark Dykeman that the death of
blogging is premature and nothing more?
Should we listen to Trevor Cook of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that blogging and the rest of the social media revolution is stalled? Or is fellow Australian technology consultant James Dellow correct and it’s OK for people to have different viewpoints?
I understand the argument. With approximately 50 million blogs in the world — 7 million updated in the past four months and 1.5 million updated in the past week — I grasp the uncertainty.
But these questions are always asked every few months and the recent spat by The Economist and Wired provide nothing new.
I agree there online saturation but I don’t think we’ve reached deafness and incomprehension.
Do you?
