I posted this as a Facebook note yesterday:
I’m currently thinking a lot about the suggestion that “blogs are dead.” It’s coming at a time in which I’m considering the direction I want to take Productive Flourishing with regards to the type of content engine I want it to be. (Don’t worry, I’m not selling it or anything crazy.)
Blogs are far from dead, but what has changed is the role they play in the web of content we live in. The rise of the Big 3 social networking sites – LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook – gives us different options for where we want to put content. And then there’s microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous.
To wit, when I started blogging four years ago, I would’ve had to write this thought on my blog. It was the only place to do so. Now I can consciously decide to post it here instead.
We creators have more choices but each choice creates a different channel for us to maintain. And, for our tribes, it creates another channel to have to watch. In some ways, I preferred when I could show up to one place and stay in the conversation. At the same time, I preferred having one place to start conversations.
What technology gives, it takes away. And as technological options change, so do social norms and expectations. How blessed we are to live in such tumultuous times!
I’m bringing it here because there are a few threads I’d like to weave into that conversation…
Harder Does Not Equal Dead
As soon as a technology or practice becomes well-established enough that it’s adopted en masse, it’s harder to stand out using that technology. The sheer number of blogs now make it harder for the next new blog to gain any mindshare just because it’s being written in the content web of so many other blogs.
It’s especially hard for newer bloggers because we’ve had to become more conscious about committing to a new blog. I’ve been around for a while, and I’ve seen plenty of awesome blogs that lasted about three months. In other cases, writers who were serious contributors stopped blogging because they had to choose between an intensive jobby (hat tip to Michele Woodward) and having a career that actually paid them to create and contribute.
Those first few months of blogging have always been hard because it feels like you’re writing to no one. The seductive lure of social media is a double-edged sword for new bloggers – on the one hand, it allows creators to connect with an audience already “out there,” and, on the other hand, it fractures the conversation and deeper content development as people tweet away their best ideas.
We Get Fractured Conversations Now – If We’re Lucky
The aforementioned Big 3 are having a bigger effect on mature blogs than many people realize. A few years ago, if you had a thought, you shared it on your blog. You didn’t have to decide whether to tweet it or make a status update or add it Tumblr.
And, while I can’t speak for what that did for other people, I know that it made me really think about what I wanted to say. A half-thought that I might tweet now would become a full thought when I could only write it here. I couldn’t not develop the thought, and a smart group of great people were patient enough to both bear with me as I worked out the ideas and expect and encourage me doing so via their comments and direct support.
As the Big 3 rose in connectivity and usability, those conversations got fractured. I no longer expected every idea I shared to be robust, insightful, and clear, and that same group of people started spending more time on Twitter than on blogs. Instead of commenting and encouraging the conversation, it became easier to hit “like” or “RT” and move on to the next thing.
And, so that you don’t read this as another creative moaning about his audience leaving him, I want to be very clear that I did the same thing to my friends and favorite writers. When Twitter was still in the early adopter phase, each individual tweet had more weight and you could seriously shine some light on great content. What started as a great way to find out what was going on, share great content, and have fun conversations morphed into something completely different, and one of the casualties of that transformation was that I “shared” rather than commenting. (I honor that your experience may have been completely different.)
I could have easily shared and commented, but that would have required slowing down and thinking about something that contributed to the conversation. It was easier to click a button and move on to the next thing. And, I rationalized, that click helped them with what really mattered – getting more people to see their content.
I appreciate each and every one of those button clicks. Please do share my work with other people. My commentary isn’t a disparagement of sharing as much as it is an illumination of the fact that we started sharing in lieu of commenting.
As we moved our conversations from our blogs to the Big 3, the Big 3 also gave us different ways to share content. Facebook, for example, has notes, which could just as easily serve the same publishing role as this website does, meaning I could just as easily write this post there as I could here.
Except the expectations would be different. I don’t think people are showing up to Facebook to read something like this. I have a hard enough time figuring out whether you’re showing up here to read stuff like this.
I doubt anyone would link back to or directly send a friend to a Facebook status, either. One of the reasons blogs aren’t dead is that they’re still probably the lowest level of content that are link-worthy. I admit I might have a blindspot here, but I’m not sure you could build your thought leadership on the Big 3 alone unless your area of thought leadership was social media.
At the same time we stopped commenting and supporting each other “on page,” we started fracturing our conversations and thoughts into different channels. The idea of unified conversations has a lot going for it, but I worry that they’re a thing of the past unless we take a more active role ensuring that the “easy” way of social media doesn’t become the only way we talk.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been more actively practicing commenting and sharing. It’s made me read and share slower, so that means I’m not skimming and clicking as much, but it’s been a refreshing change. It’s a challenging practice, too.
Technology Gives Choices, Not Directions
One of my simple rules is “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” You can spend a lot of time looking into all the different technological options without ever figuring out what direction you need to be going first. It’s about like looking at all the ways you might get to Manhattan, Kansas without assessing whether you actually need to go there in the first place.
The more we go with the technological flow, though, the more we have to be mindful about whether or not we have our own flow anymore. I’ve talked to many people who went with the technology only to figure out that the technology didn’t suit the strategy that made sense for them.
I don’t pretend to know any better than you do, either. As I mentioned, I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction I want Productive Flourishing to go. What makes it especially challenging is that, though I’m sure I could play the blogging game circa 2011, I’m not sure that I want to or that it’s the right thing for me. In some senses, the standard blogging game has never been right for me.
I’ll provide a little context here. Short and sweet posts tend to get more content and traffic than longer pieces like this one. When a post starts to reach about 1200 words, I know going into it that it’ll get fewer comments, shares, and love than one of the shorter pieces, and that’s mainly because I know that one of the first things people will do is look to see how long the post is before they commit to reading it. If there’s a lot of scrolling involved, they’ll either decide to “read it later” or just opt out of it altogether. Again, no judgment here, as I’m prone to do the same thing.
If my goal was simply more traffic and comments, it would make sense to write shorter and sweeter posts. Strategy aside, it’s significantly harder, emotionally, to commit to spending the time simplifying a complex thought when you know that you’ll hear crickets chirping when it’s published, especially when you know that a quick piece that takes 30 minutes to develop will get more love, in general. In the busyness of business and life, easy options win more often than not.
And therein is how the technology changes us. Continually taking the easy options unconsciously also means we take the consequences unconsciously. It’s not that taking the easy option is bad – I’m a fan of simple and easy – but rather that not thinking about the downstream effects is what becomes a challenge. We look up to find that the easy bus has taken us a few stops further than we intended.
Blogs aren’t dead, but the way in which they sit in the web of content is different than it was a mere year ago. The new technological options are just that, and it’s our use of them that we need to be more aware of. Continually fracturing our communities and conversations and then blaming technology misses the point that we build the web that then affects us.
At the same time, though we could be bull-headed about the way in which we’ll create, if you’re doing it in the marketplace of ideas and attention, you need to be adaptable enough to meet the wants and needs of the people you’re creating with and for. If you’re creating “just for you,” create however you please, wherever you please, when you please, and whatever you please – but don’t have hurt feelings if no one shows up to the party you haven’t invited anyone to.
As always, thanks for your time. I hope this scratches an itch you’ve been having.
Blogs died in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. Thankfully the blogging Gods resurrect them yearly.
I know, right? By the way, email marketing and direct response marketing are dead, too. Nice seeing you, Glen!
It’s the ‘go deep or go home’ thing again, isn’t it?
The challenge of the day (in my mind) is to understand who your audience is and then cultivate a cross-channel conversation with those people. The sea of conversation is more vast now, but if one can focus on the conversations that really matter — and roll with the punches of fragmentation — it all works out.
Of course, the overarching, more persistent (and timeless) challenge is deciding what matters enough to talk about in the first place 😉
Great observations, Karri. The things that matter have an interesting way of bubbling up…
I appreciate the thought, time and depth of an article like this. It likely stems from a previous life as a journalist, when I frequently had permission to give a story the length it needed to be properly told. Back when ink and newsprint were cheap…
Because I, too, have felt like a fish out of water in the status update and tweet world, liking and sharing seemed an OK alternative. But I’m realizing how little I recall or use of what I read or scanned, or where I read it.
You have good company in this thinking. Seth Godin recently wrote about how he doesn’t understand how students in a lecture can truly comprehend what they’re hearing if they’re spending their time tweeting notes about it. He used it as a segue to reinforce the power of books, his latest focus. http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/03/books-notes-tweets-and-the-change.html
The thread that runs through both your and Godin’s thinking is a return to being fully present in our conversations, communications and interactions. It’s that willingness to keep our awareness right here, right now. Scattering your attention among multiple channels fractures not only our conversations, but our ability to engage deeply with people and ideas. The quality of our presence suffers.
Thanks for providing some context and perspective on our technological choices and the consequences. I enjoy the food for thought.
Marsha, enjoyed this comment. Books and reading are my greatest loves and I spend less and less time with them. Was only vaguely aware of Domino Project, but will take a closer look. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback, Marsha – it’s nice to be appreciated. 🙂
I was thinking about what Seth said the other day, as it reminded me of what I wrote about multithreading back in 2009. (Really? It’s been that long?)
Passive attention comes easy. Being mindful and actively attentive is now the challenge, and that shows up in how we create, connect, and consume.
So I read the whole piece and my first reaction was to tweet it. Hah! Let’s see if I can slow down long enough to write a comment instead.
You’re onto something, as always. I’m starting to wonder whether the folks who are most into Twitter are my people. Most of the folks I enjoy being with face-to-face — and working with over time — are not on Twitter at all. They cringe at the thought. They may be slightly active on Facebook or LinkedIn.
But mostly they read books. And The New Yorker.
Hmm. That’s food for thought, isn’t it?
Thanks, Charlie.
As I mentioned in the piece, slowing down to comment rather than doing the social media driveby is a challenging practice. Thanks for succeeding!
I’ve often thought about the digital migrants that still see the web as network of ideas rather than people. Here’s my question for you: what is it about books and the New Yorker that they find worth paying for? (Talk to you soon! 🙂 )
Thanks for taking the time to write this. And then also posting to your blog. 🙂 For me, I love the beauty of RSS. I can take breaks during my workday to read the great content that Outlook dutifully delivers to my inbox. I just started reading your blog, and I love it. A recent article by your guest poster Cath Duncan even led me to some information that lent me a big awakening. I hope that, although it may be less “marketable”, you still find a way to get out some, if not all, of your more complex ideas here.
They are read and appreciated (by at least me). 🙂
Thanks and much love,
Kaya K.
Many things have contributed to today being a great day, and your comment is one of them. Thank you for writing, and welcome to the community!
Charlie, like Glen said above, I’ve been hearing that “blogging is dead” for at least three years now. It’s clearly not – but as you point out, it’s definitely different. The way we absorb (or don’t) information and share it is markedly different than it was just a short time ago. Marsha made a good point that I can relate to – with all this “sharing”, how much are we really absorbing? It’s impossible – so when someone sees something “shareworthy”, it’s just one click of a button. Then we move on – without allowing that great thing to sink in.
I’m also hearing a lot lately that people are rediscovering the clients in their own backyard. They’ve realized that by reaching out to the world they’ve largely ignored the local market. I wonder if eventually the same thing will happen with blogs – it’s a cycle to some degree.
Thanks for putting this out there – good food for thought.
Lisa, nice to see your name! You have a great point about clients in our own backyards. I’m starting to get into more local, face-to-face interaction through Biznik — and I think it’s very promising. There’s nothing like knowing people “in real life.”
Hi Pam! I thought the same about you when I saw your smiling face here. 🙂
It’s true about that face-to-face contact. I think that when we interact every day with people online it feels like we’re present in their space, but then we actually get to meet in person, there’s a special sweetness about it. That’s why meet-ups are so terrific, when we can make them happen. There’s a special connection that you just can’t get through a screen.
What, is that my dear Pam McAllister extolling the virtues of connecting? :p
Great point regarding the backyard, Lisa, which is why we build converged businesses. There are so many opportunities literally right outside the door, and it’s fascinating how manifesting those opportunities requires a different avenue of approach. There’s definitely an “AND” approach here if we work it right, though.
I don’t mind reading longer blog posts as opposed to a weak, short one. I have read some blog posts that were 6000-8000 words long. It all depends on the writer of the post and what message they are sending.
Many people are getting jaded with social networking sites, but they are addicted to it and can’t seem to let it go.
I would like to see a resurgence of social groups getting together and sharing ideas in a physical place as opposed to online. If you can’t physically attend then online via a webcam could be a secondary option.
That would be nice. Perhaps more of a barrier to a physical place is the idea of synchonously co-creating something. In many ways, it’s not technology itself but the secondary effects that we’re more addicted to. In this case, I’m referencing asynchronous conversations and co-creations.
Thanks for sharing this, Charlie. Almost every blog post I write is > 1200 words, and I definitely feel the hit in terms of commenting/sharing. Which may be why I’m not comfortable with calling my writing “blogging”. Though of course it is.
I’m in the middle of a big re-design and I’ve been re-thinking how I want to implement the sharing/conversation factor. And I’ve decided to move the conversation largely to a Twitter hashtag and have that integrated into the blog in lieu of comments. Either people are going to love the new direction or absolutely hate it. But for me, comments aren’t adding a whole lot to the mix, except for making me anxious and adding “moderator” to my job description.
That’s surely not the right direction for everyone. When comments work, they add a lot. But when “get more comments” becomes an agenda that feels forced, and “leave a comment” becomes something visitors feel like they SHOULD do but don’t necessarily WANT to do, then maybe it’s time to experiment with something else.
Which, by the way, is obviously not happening here. Long live Charlie’s comments! 😉
Nice recovery, Sarah! I hadn’t assumed you meant thats what was happening here, but it’s nice to have it cleared out of the possibilities.
Sometimes I don’t like calling my posts “posts.” I might prefer articles or pieces – and others often call them articles, too. Or sometimes treatises or dissertations, depending on how long-winded I get.
It’ll be interesting to see how your hastag technique works out. It really could go either way, but what’s the fun of not exploring?
Well, it looks like I’m going to keep the comments. Twitter search only goes back 6 days, and all of the older tweets are “unavailable”. I guess I’ll have to save my experiment for when Twitter search has a longer shelf-life. 🙂
Charlie – I rarely comment on blogs but I do enjoy reading the carefully chosen few that are fed to my i Google homepage (of which this has been one for some time). I’ve never really grasped Twitter although I have an account and FB is mainly to check on the activities of my children and grandchildren and get round the problem of enormous emails containg pictures.
Thank you for all your great articles and planners.
Thanks for keeping PF on the iGoogle page, Shirls, and I appreciate the feedback. You also got a chuckle from me with your understatement of “enormous emails containing pictures.” :p
I always like the longer posts. I like reading the author’s nuanced thoughts and appreciating their writing style. Also, the information is always richer and usually more accessible for me to translate into use in my own life. When I look at the list of blogs I follow in my google reader, I’m struck by how the vast majority of them are people who write ‘long’. Except for Seth 🙂
I think part of the dynamic is not just that the on-line mediums have fractured into so many more channels for the content creators. The other end of the transaction is the reader pool and I’m not sure that readers have figured out their best content access style either. I’m amazed how many people have never heard of, much less use, RSS feeds.
Also, for the content creators and content consumers there’s the variety of purpose and needs that we have, so the different channels attempt to ‘fit’ those varying needs, sort of. But I’m not sure the channels/mediums themselves had/have clarity on how people can best use them.
I think that it is our personal consciousness in media literacy and intentionality that we might be a little light on these days. We don’t train or discuss these things with each other or our children.
So I think people “talk and walk” through all the platforms without much reflection until after the alienation, distanced, cotton candy-sick feelings start to rise.
But I see it with the “old technology” of books too. When I ask people what they are reading this week…I get a lot of blank looks, laughs, “I don’t have time”, or “I read something a couple of months ago. What was it again?”. Reading books is a daily practice of mine and one of the primary joys of my life since I was a kid. Not true of most people from what I can see.
So, Charlie, it might be more about who are you going to write to and for rather than which platform(s) you choose to use.
Great post. I reluctantly admit that I often read blog posts quickly, with a lot of scanning, trying to figure out what the main point is and breathing a sigh of relief when I feel like I can just hit delete (if it was e-mailed to me) or close the window.
But I *love* sitting down with a copy of Wired magazine and delving into complex thoughts that could never be neatly summed up into bullet points.
Your long posts are as great as your short ones. You’re a terrific writer. My eyes never glaze over. Do not despair! 🙂
I think part of the problem is: 1) There is too much “stuff” on the internet now and 2) Your blog is aptly titled “Productive Flourishing.”
You can’t flourish and be productive if you’re spending all day reading and commenting on people’s blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. Sometimes…folks have to actually do the work!
“You can’t flourish and be productive if you’re spending all day reading and commenting on people’s blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. Sometimes…folks have to actually do the work!”
Well put, Stephanie! 🙂
Thanks for the feedback, Stephanie. And, shhh!, don’t tell a bunch of creative folks that they actually have to do the work. It ruins the fun and reminds them about that thing they’re putting off. 🙂
Every year ending, copyblogger does post that says something like this; “Blogging dead” and every year we realize the opposite is the truth.
Blogging is one of the essential pillars of the internet. It is at the centre of information dissemination, especially quality information. Most of the things we find on social networking sites are not as authoritative as what we read on blogs. People tend to be more social than intellectual on social networks compared to blogs where people come for very serious reasons.
So blogs will die the day mankind ceases to be in need of quality information for their mental development.
I like what you said, Tito. Well put.
Christine
Sometimes the metrics we use for this stuff confuse me. I’ve heard people say that they like reading blogs with a certain posting frequency (let’s say 3 times per week or so), but like you said they won’t take time to read anything longer than 1000 words or so.
So rather than providing a couple thousand words on a topic and covering it in depth all at once, I’m finding myself providing 500-800 word snippets and scattering them throughout the week (or over multiple weeks).
Myself, I’d rather have the opposite – give me 2000 words at the beginning of the week, and let me just down it all in one sitting. 🙂
Your thoughts on this are valued Charlie – thanks!
Well, that was weird, how you tagged the very behavior that I was doing with your article, scrolling down to see how long it was to decide whether or not to read it now or later (or at all because of info overload…) Nevertheless, part of what I like about you is that you ARE thoughtful and you do write articles that are longer and more engaging. When they’re worth reading, a few hundred more words won’t stop me (or lots of the people who have already replied!)
Thanks for the food for thought!
Christine
I read your whole article Charlie, as I do with most of your pieces. Please keep up the long form of blog posting — it clearly suits you! Not everything can be condensed into a 140-character info McNugget.
I think the reason most people (myself included) get caught up in sharing and retweeting is that it gives us the illusion of progress. We’ve crossed something off of our list. We’ve discharged our obligation to provide a little link karma to a deserving writer.
But when we do this we aren’t actually contributing to the conversation, nor thinking deeply about what we’ve read, and that’s a shame.
Thanks for the great reminder of what makes the blogosphere work. It won’t die as long as all of us keep thinking, writing, and commenting.
Great article, Charlie, thank you, and great comments. You obviously hit a nerve.
I’m curious: what advice do you give to someone (me) who is gearing up to *start* blogging? ::sheepishly smiles:: Sharma says always drive them back to your web/blogsite, don’t give all your stuff away on the big 3. Yes? No? Sometimes?
Whoops! I meant Shama. I hit submit too soon…
What lovely, thoughtful commenters you have, Charlie. Could it be because you write longer, more thoughtful posts?
I’ve been writing longer posts lately, and now it’s hard to write a short one. A longer post just gives more elbow room. A thousand words seems to be a good length – long enough to make a substantial point but not so long that you have time to go off on tangents or write fluff.
The original blog was about ones personal life. Most of those are gone now (since your personal life is better when you can share it, eg. Facebook). What remains now is the Blog software, and people, like yourself, coming up with interesting ways to use it.
This is actually the fun part of the Blogging era… The technology, like Squarespace, and WordPress, is super slick, and anyone can do one for free, you don’t really have to be a poindexter. So the range of subjects you see discussed on blogs really runs the gamut. Best of all, blogs encourage comments and subscribers, which means… duh duh DUH.. you can build a fanbase.
The Personal Webblog? Who needs it. But Blogs as a platform? Totally rock.
That’s a really good point, Michael. I remember the earlier blogs and you’re right about much of that content migrating to Facebook and Twitter. I’m also liking the interesting ways people are using the blog platform for so many purposes. Plus, it’s nice that easy access to design has gotten much better. My eyes still hurt when I think of some of the screens I had to look at, lol!
Charlie, you are one of the few people in my Google Reader whose long blog posts I hope never go away. You do good, thoughtful work — consistently — and that is a rare gem in this day of fractured, scattered, one-inch deep connectivity.
Thank you for what you do.
This post and the wonderful comment thread have stirred up a lot of thoughts for me. They’re not new thoughts, but the comment space is a great place to flesh out one’s own ideas in response to a post, isn’t it? So here’s what it brought up for me:
1. I think you’re on to something really important by noticing that all the advances in social media technology brought consequences we may not have consciously realized they brought until it was too late and it had already done its damage by way of reduced concentration ability and lesser ability to sustain deep thoughts and longer conversation.
2. I think the result of this is the need to ask the question: What sort of people do we really want to be? We have to notice what’s happening and be responsible in our response to it.
3. Gwen Bell is someone noticing and taking this seriously right now. She is a leader, to me, in the area of being intentional to take what’s good from social media while being sure to cultivate in one’s inner life the depth that is important to maintain and bring to appropriate channels online.
4. I wonder if we, the consumers, are beginning to develop the ability to filter through content and stick with what’s worthy or not worthy of our time and attention, in the same way publishers used to make that decision for us by choosing what books to publish or not publish. We’ve held up this new age of technology as a way for anybody to publish anything and be heard … and yet we’re bumping up against the noise, noise, noise and the finite nature of time. I see this becoming a question for me of which blogs I truly want to dedicate time to sink into and interact with, and which ones I just simply can’t or won’t because time and the ability to sustain long, deep thoughts and conversation in limited amounts won’t allow it.
In other words, perhaps our individual blogrolls will simply become shorter so that we can go deeper instead of broader … and save the Big 3 for the broader, shallower sharing. Maybe?
Charlie, are you sure all this doesn’t apply to your specific category only? I follow a number of political, scientific and crafts blogs (yes, this is possible) for a few years now, and I haven’t had any of these thoughts till I read your article. To me facebook and twitter (I despise linkedin, plus I’m not able to find how to delete my account, even after contacting them) and blogs are as well-separated as different kinds of tv programs.
Or maybe I’m judging only from specific blogs – but this same thing could also mean that you talked only about those going with the stream.
Or maybe it’s that I’m not in the States 🙂
Best
I love this post (and also the beautiful, clear design of this site – so pleasant on the eye!).
There’s a concept in there that I really appreciate, the ‘converged’ business which works globally via its online presence, and very, very locally, in offering things to businesses just around the corner. This is probably because I’m struggling with getting the balance right – online can seem easier and yet not really worth the huge time spent on it.
Bringing these observations into view is really amazing Charlie. Indeed, blogging had drastically changed today with the birth of bigger networking sites. Before I only knew people who blog to be able to express what their thoughts are, nowadays it’s funny to note how majority blogs as a way to earn (internet marketing mostly) rather than a form of hobby. (I particularly like the term “jobby” by the way.) With this, all the points you’ve mentioned above came to surface. For some it may be a problem, but for others it can be an advantage.
I’m just curious though, given these predicaments you’ve stated, what do you think is the best possible way for us to manage this? Is there a way of making blogging “EASIER=ALIVE” in contrast to “HARDER=DEAD”?
I am a new reader and loved this post and *loved* that it was long. It needed to be long. Thank you!
-Kristen
It’s only been about six months since I joined Facebook and Twitter, and now I know what ADHD feels like. In the past, I’d been a big reader of books, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Now I’m trying to keep up with fb and twitter and the inevitable blog links … and to the blogs I subscribe to. It’s as if I jumped onto the horse and drove off in 10 different directions at once.
Finding a long article, like yours, that I could sink into was a blessing.
I have a fb page, a website and a newsletter and am wondering what, besides something to link to on twitter, a blog will ad to that mix.
Thank you for laying it out so articulately.
Joan, you hit the nail on the head – how can we NOT feel a little ADHD sometimes when we have so much “shouting” at us all at once? It’s all about doing only as much as our brains can handle, and finding that limit is a challenge all on its own.