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Are Blogs a Thing of the Past?

Stefan Tilkov,

Prompted by Tim Bray's recent piece, I thought a bit about my blogging and blog reading habits. To me, writing a blog post is still very different from writing a tweet – and in the end, I usually find it much more rewarding due to the comments and discussion that (often) evolve from it. I can honestly say that the effort I spent on writing blog posts over the past few years has paid off many times over due to the amount of stuff I have learned from others in the process. I can't say the same for Twitter, not in general, at least – I find it amusing, but it's an order of magnitude less serious. Which is part of its appeal, of course.

Regarding reading: I read tons of feeds, but many of them are created by applications - bug trackers, wikis, our internal invoicing application, search engine alerts, alarms … and of course I still follow blogs, although admittedly I have shrunk the list from a few hundred to about 80. For these, I don't see Twitter replacing anything, either: These blogs contain entries that I don't want to miss knowing about – with Twitter, I don't lose any sleep if I don't follow anything for a few weeks.

So - Is blogging over? No, I don't think so.

On August 5, 2009 2:26 AM, Jacek said:

Blogs are losing the hype factor, and I sure won’t miss it. But I wouldn’t give up reading blogs, and maybe blogging when I start doing interesting stuff again. I don’t remember who said or wrote that, but someone remarked that when a new technology is pronounced dead, you can be sure it’s working well where appropriate.

Oh, and I’m not on twitter. I’ve been resisting that particular time sink well so far. 8-)

On August 20, 2009 2:18 PM, Martin Wildam said:

I also find blogs much more valuable. Last but not least because Twitter is much more like unsorted background noise of the universe. A topic may be dropped as quickly as it arises.

After a very short testing period I found Twitter having no real value for me.

Sure, there are many people started blogging in the hype days and stopped then - but there are also those which survive over a long time.

So keep on writing my friend - even because I subscribed your blog today after listening to your talk about REST.

On August 24, 2009 11:17 PM, Matthias Bohlen said:

On my blog, I installed Twitter Tools so that my tweets are reflected in the blog. One of my readers complained about too much noise (he disabled my RSS feed on his iPhone). So, today I thought twice, then I put the tweets into the blog’s sidebar and deleted them from the main column of the blog. The blog is now readable again.

Stefan: Yes, I agree with you: Blogging is more serious and should be kept so.