blogging on life support...

professional blogger, paul boutin, correspondent for vallywag (a silicon valley BLOG) has written a short essay for wired magazine on how he believes that blogging is dead. he says blogging "is so 2004", that if you're thinking of starting one, you shouldn't, and if you already have one, you should "pull the plug". he goes on to say how twitter, flickr, and facebook are the new blog, and that it's not the bright idea that it was four years ago, mostly due to over saturation, - it's too big, and too impersonal. he says that it's impossible to "get noticed", which i'm sot sure is the intent of your ordinary joe the plumber blogger, (it certainly wasn't mine), and that your blog only attracts the 'nets lowest form of life - the insult commenter. now, it's hard to argue with many of these points. it could also be noted that he is basically saying leave the blogging to professional writers like him and take down your weak personal blog that no one reads because it sucks and you're a loser. i think the question is a bit bigger than that. you have to realize what a blogger's intention is and what they envisioned their blog to be, or not be. i, like scads of others, began blogging before blogger and wordpress we're mainstream (yes, that's what everyone says but it's true) and i have kept running with it, not because i think it will ever make me famous, but mostly because i still occasionally kind of like to do it. i probably post less often than i used to, (maybe once a week?) but i have supplemented, rather than completely replaced my posts, with 140 charachter and under tweets, via twitter. i never started this with any goal other than "to document my day-to-day activities, archive the past, post occasional pictures, and attempt to appear cooler than i really am" as it states in my profile bio. now, granted, blogging doesn't make you appear cool at all in todays world, so i may have to re-think my mission statement. i don't consider my self a clever wordsmith, or even a a cut-rate journalist, and i've never tried to be. the fact is that blogging still provides me the outlet i want and people are always free to choose to read it or not - which is how it should be. there may be a time in the future, and i've discussed this with others that blog, where all amatuer blogging will run it's course and just sort of die away - but i'm not sure that i'm ready for that to happen today.
this concludes this weeks obligatory post - only tweets now til the 4th week of october.