To Blog or not to blog.....

Just read the following article in the Economist. Gets you thinking, doesn't it?
It's true though that it's increasingly difficult to differentiate between a real blog and just a photo album. Or even Facebook pages - most of which look like diaries of the user - probably enabling stalkers around the world easy access to many unsuspecting teenagers' lives. Many of them seem to update their Facebook profiles just to be the limelight or on account of the phobia that they will be cut out of peer groups and to be on par with their friends.

Excerpts of the article... its on page 76 - if you are interested :)

With "a heavy heart, and much consideration", Jason Calacanis this summer announced his "retirement from blogging", which he believed was "the right decision for me and my family". ..........

"Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it," he offered by way of explanation. It was, he said, "the pressure" of staying on the A-list - ie, of keeping his blog so big and impersonal - that got him. Only a few years ago, so few people blogged that being in a blogosphere celebrity required little more than showing up. Now it takes hard work. And vitriol. "Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarised, and so filled with haters hating that it's simply not worth it," Mr. Calacanis lamented........

.......... Blogging has entered the mainstream, which - as with every new medium in history - looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the earliest practitioners, over a decade ago, blogging was regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts, to a few friends and family members. Today lots of Internet users do this, only they may not think of it as blogging. Instead, they update their profile pages on Facebook, MySpace or other social networks.........

....... Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may "die" in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. .........

The Economist , November 8th 2008

As DeeCee says, "Any thoughts yo?"

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