Jason Kottke: The blog is dead, long live the blog

No Ego
No Ego

The blog-father, Jason Kottke opines that the blog has died…

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs. Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium.

In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids. Instead of launching blogs, companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge. The Verge or Gawker or Talking Points Memo or BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post are no more blogs than The New York Times or Fox News, and they are increasingly not referring to themselves as such.

The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter.

(click here to continue reading The blog is dead, long live the blog » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

Yikes! G4 - still chugging
Yikes! G4 – still chugging

As an aside, though I’ve never met Mr. Kottke, he had a lot to do with how this humble blog exists. I always had a website, since first getting a floppy-disc copy of Mosaic1 way back in the Stone Age, but never knew what to do with my site until I discovered Kottke.org. Ahh, blogging, I could do that. I never learned how to code HTML beyond the basics, but blogging only required basic HTML and CSS skills. Sadly, I’ve become an increasingly lazy blogger, posting less and less frequently, but I haven’t thrown in the towel yet. 

He does have a point though, Twitter and Facebook and so forth consume an ever larger percentage of our collective online energies. Unfortunately, in my opinion, but then I’m over 402. Facebook especially is troubling to me as too often I hear of some arbitrary deletion of posting privileges, with minimal recourse. If you own your own data, you have much more control. Also if we only use Twitter and Facebook to communicate, we lose a large portion of our individuality – there becomes a vanilla plainness to the online world. On one side of the equation, no blink tags – yayyy; on the other, boring, shallow sites like BuzzFeed and HuffPost become the norm – meh.

I took the opportunity to clean up my blogroll, removing a few blogs that have died, and keeping a few dead blogs with the hope they resurrect. If you are reading this, and you have a compelling reason for me to add you to my blogroll, leave me a comment, and I’ll consider it.

Footnotes:
  1. in beta? or was that Netscape Navigator? Memory gets fuzzy []
  2. albeit childless []

Technorati Revisted

Technorati requires that this code

HYQ5WCYW8DZK

be included in a post in order to add this blog to their index. Many years ago, I frequently used Technorati, those days are past. Nonetheless, why not?

See how happy this makes me?

Christmas Cheer 
Christmas Cheer

Update: well that was useless, just like Technorati, I suppose. Oh well, only took a few moments of my time. Remind me to delete all future email from Technorati, unread.

Email Of My Digital Day

We Deliver - Just not Saturdays
We Deliver – Just not Saturdays

If you are interested, in the slightest, in my daily travails and triumphs, you should sign up for my daily email post – automatically created via Google’s Feedburner. In this email, you’ll see my most recent ten photographs, and I will do my best to give you a few interesting articles to read every day. Ideally, you’ll see portions of 9 or 101 articles, plus a sampling of my photographs of the day.

If my work day allows it, there might also be a few blog posts as well included in the email – which are usually longer entries, but to be honest, I don’t seem to have the stamina to create blog posts each and every day any more. Basically, the email will contain items that will never appear on the blog itself – mostly because I’m a lazy fr*ck.

As far as what kind of content you’ll receive in the email, I’d guess the mix of topics to roughly be:

  • Photographs
  • 40% national US politics
  • 5% Chicago politics
  • 5% local politics somewhere else like Texas or California, or somewhere I have an interest (Baltimore, Oregon, San Francisco, New York City, Guam, Austin, Yurtistan, yadda yadda). Yeah, I read a lot. I do. Every day, usually.
  • 10% music and music history – jazz, blues, rock, Bob Dylan, whatever. 
  • 10% film and film history – I am a film school drop-out after all
  • 10% Apple related – I’ve been a Mac user since before it was cool
  • 10% humor, or what I find funny 
  • 10% weird and unusual stories from the old, weird America and the old, weird world…

Truthfully, the email is a simple communication tool, and you should go ahead and sign up. Even if you don’t get around to reading every single one, you’ll still find items of interest when you do read the email. Plus, the email is free…

What do you have to lose?

Footnotes:
  1. the Feedburner limit []

Swanksalot’s Solipsism

I Don't Wanna Look Down
I Don’t Wanna Look Down

I finally found a use for my long-standing Blogger account – all of my photos from Flickr and Instagram end up there. Thanks to the magic of IFTTT (If this than that, a great service if you have a few different online accounts), every photo that I upload to Flickr, every photo I upload to Instagram, every photo I “like” on Flickr, every photo I “like” on Instagram, every YouTube video I “favorite”, and so on is automatically uploaded into a Blogger post. If you are ever bored, you can browse this page for visual stimulation…

(click here to continue reading Swanksalot’s Solipsism.)

Whatever it is called when you add a pickled pepper to a martini
Whatever it is called when you add a pickled pepper to a martini

Reading Around on September 30th

Some additional reading September 30th from 10:40 to 12:32:

  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: My Life and Times Archives – Roger Ebert is becoming more and more endearing to me1. A 21st CE man of the people… “One of my favoring pastimes, especially when I should be doing something else, is moseying around the blogs of my readers”

    I’ve never left a comment there, by the way, and probably wouldn’t – I tend to write responses to other’s posts in this space instead.

    MN King Corn.jpg

  • Total Dick-Head: The Church of Latter Day Dicks – “Why then, is the only going science-fiction author cult of personality devoted to — of all people — L Ron Hubbard?! If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god — I’d want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD’s work so mythic!”
  • http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4509&print=1 – Specifically, the Global Cities Index ranks cities’ metro areas according to 24 metrics across five dimensions. The first is business activity: including the value of its capital markets, the number of Fortune Global 500 firms headquartered there, and the volume of the goods that pass through the city. The second dimension measures human capital, or how well the city acts as a magnet for diverse groups of people and talent. This includes the size of a city’s immigrant population, the number of international schools, and the percentage of residents with university degrees. The third dimension is information exchange—how well news and information is dispersed about and to the rest of the world. The number of international news bureaus, the amount of international news in the leading local papers, and the number of broadband subscribers round out that dimension.
  • skinless weiners.jpg
Footnotes:
  1. if that’s the right word to use []