5 ms·

Kill your blog

36 points by narendra 18y ago

dmoney 18y ago
In the programming world, there is a healthy ecosystem of bloggers. If Steve Yegge switches to Twitter, I quit. One great thing about the web is that you can structure your content however you want.
henning 18y ago
If you want to share medium-sized amounts of timely information, blogs and screencasts are the best conduits that I know of. As for "expressing yourself" with Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, photos, throwing pillows at people, and 140 character ephemera do not substitute for a solid, well-edited blog post.
- adnam 18y ago
  "The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter." One word: SUBMARINE.
IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
I think Paul Boutin might have a crush on me. some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack Um... "foohack" is only used by one troll, afaik, and I'm not anonymous. :P http://tr.im/h9f http://tr.im/h9f This is the same Paul Boutin who was so impressed by my resume. http://tr.im/h9g http://tr.im/h9g
- daveambrose 18y ago
  Was there ever a follow-up story to the VW post on your resume?
  - IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
    No, not that I know of. Though I did get pinged randomly by a yahoo employee from china who saw the story and looked me up in the corporate directory.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Is that the old guy who wears sunglasses at night or?
randrews 18y ago
A dissenting opinion: Writing a blog helps you organize your thoughts, improves your writing skills, and teaches you to make good arguments (and recognize bad ones). None of that requires having an audience. At least an audience larger than your friends and coworkers. If you like to write, don't stop writing because it's not "where the buzz is at". There's more to life than following trends.
- acgourley 18y ago
  Well said. In addition to that, I use my blog to host content I hope people will find via google, like how-tos or coding gotchas. I'm not going to post a coding trick to my facebook account, even if it has more active readers.
  - randrews 18y ago
    Exactly. Some content, like status updates, is perfect for Twitter or Facebook, but this article seems to assume that that's all anyone uses blogs for. Please god say it ain't so. I would like to think that people who keep blogs (at least the subset thereof that also read Wired) tend to write more interesting things in them, and I can't imagine that being replaced by 140 characters (this notwithstanding: http://twitter.com/_why/statuses/881768089 http://twitter.com/_why/statuses/881768089 )
    - alex_c 18y ago
      If this is actually a ploy to get pointless blogs out of Google's index and hidden behind Facebook's garden wall, then I'm all for it!
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  You can also write in your blog for your great-great-great-grandkids -- family that hasn't been born yet. Or you can write as a way of organizing book material. Or you can write as a way to keep and share memories with just a few people. Blogging is an internal thing first, external second.
brlewis 18y ago
He assumes blogs make media hard to upload. Posterous breaks that rule. Then there's my site, OurDoings, where the photos you upload form the skeleton of a blog, backdated by when the photos were taken. You can leave it as just photos or fill it in with as much writing as you want.
senihele 18y ago
Why are they mutually exclusive? Seems like they each work best when supported by everything else. The defining characteristic of 2008 is not twitter, as it was blogging in 2004, but rather the growing interconnectivity of all web services.
raganwald 18y ago
Kill your blog? Say it aint so! http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/07/brief-history-of-dangerous-ideas.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/07/brief-history-of-dangero...
MikeCapone 18y ago
They're just trying to be sensationalistic. To each his own. If you prefer the blog format, by all means keep blogging. If you prefer twitter, go do that..
- benbeltran 18y ago
  exactly what I was thinking... Soo, just because some people stop blogging and move to other platforms everyone should? Screw that. Of course, if you intend to use your blog to make some dinero and pay some of the bills, it's probably not going to work... but neither will twitter or facebook for that matter. If you just want to express yourself, use whatever you want and whatever your public will use. And can't you have a blog AND twitter, facebook, etc?
cstejerean 18y ago
And stop writing books people, it's so 1900. Surely you can convey everything you'd write about in a series of 140 char twitter messages.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- unalone 18y ago
  I think that books have lost prominence, though. People have found that there are mediums that convey their messages far better. The book isn't dead. But it's not as used now as it was in the past. People with visions and dreams find that it's easier to make movies, or form bands. Some people write, yes, but the book is not as dominant as it was in 1900. The same stands for the play and the concerto. Blogs still have their uses. But now, things exist that work better for a lot of people. Twitter and Tumblr come to mind immediately.
  - jamesbritt 18y ago
    " People with visions and dreams find that it's easier to make movies, or form bands. Some people write, yes, but the book is not as dominant as it was in 1900. The same stands for the play and the concerto." Any references to back this up? I bet it's easier to self-publish a book than it is to make a movie.
    - unalone 18y ago
      I self-published a book in my senior year of high school, so yes. That's possible. However, I referred to the set of genres overall. The book certainly is not dead. However, it takes up less of the "fine arts" market proportionally than it did a hundred years ago, and that's because other genres exist that allow people certain other freedoms. It is easier to form a band now than it was a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, it would have been extremely difficult, and there was less of a popular focus. There wasn't the insane level of attention to rock stars back then. And motion pictures didn't exist at all. Neither did animated pictures or video games. This is applicable to the blogging situation as follows: 5 years ago, if you wanted to write online, a blog was the best way to go. Now? Not necessarily. Now you can Tweet if that serves your purpose, or you can maintain a videolog or a tumblelog. Many friends of mine abandoned their blogs for Tumblr for precisely that reason: it fits their needs. And yes, that's still technically a blog, but the format has changed. There are different rules and there is focus on different things. It's entirely different from maintaining a blog on Wordpress or Movable Type. Nowadays, I don't see very many interesting posts from personal blogs. The blog posts I DO find interesting come from only a few places. The attention has changed to a variety of different mediums. Look at r/bestof/ on Reddit: suddenly, there are people who come to attention entirely through metaposting. Or, to take my example, I now link to my HN threads on my site and I've abandoned my blog for essays. It lets me build up a better relation between content that I write on the fly and content that builds up, that I slowly formulate and revise. Of course the book isn't dead, or even dying, though in my opinion it's been 50 years since the last truly revolutionary piece of pure literature (Beckett). However, now if you've got a mind for expression there are more writing-based venues available. 100 years ago, you either wrote poetry, wrote novels, or wrote plays. Now you have lyric writing, film-writing, and game writing available. That fits what people want much more. Look at the invention of science fiction: when movies first appeared, literature stopped dealing with sci-fi largely for several decades, because the minds that were attracted to sci-fi were attracted to cinema. The same thing is happening with video games right now: not all but many writers are joining on the science fiction game bandwagon. And so, if I were a game designer looking at a bunch of college students interested in science fiction, I might very well advise the students that novel writing might NOT be the best way to go on with sci-fi. Some people would ignore that and go on and try, but with so many other venues available, there's less of a pressure for books. That's how I see this article: it's an argument that a blog isn't necessary anymore. That doesn't mean people won't like it, and use it, but it means that blogging is no longer the primary source of content on the Internet.
ivankirigin 18y ago
Gary V. had great advice: "people ask what social networking tools I should use ... twitter, jaiku, etc. The answer? Use all of them" There is nothing exclusive about twitter & blogging. You'll note those with the biggest personal brands and most followers are often bloggers. This is because facebook and twitter are both bad at content/person discovery. Blogging is a good way to let people find out who you are.
- unalone 18y ago
  Ugh. I dislike that advice very much. I'm not a fan of people who use social networking to advertise. I know there are practical benefits, but the idealist in me wishes that people wouldn't pick up media just to abuse it. Some things are great: I remember there was a comment here about somebody who complained about Comcast on Twitter and got an instant response. But I've seen too many people who use Twitter and Jaiku and Tumblr to post links back to their content and that's that, and I hate that. Of course, the idealist in me thinks that you shouldn't advertise in every venue possible, that you should work until you've got something so useful that word-of-mouth brings people in, and that's not entirely practical either.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    Disclaimer: TicketStumbler uses Twitter, Facebook and Blogging What if you have people come to you instead of vice versa? For example, you never follow anyone on twitter you make people follow you. I agree that the spammers are a huge problem, but I think some of these tools can be used for good. I raged about Comcast on Twitter yesterday and they haven't done anything. Bastards.
    - unalone 18y ago
      The ones you mentioned are okay if you're using them decently. I can see why TicketStumbler would benefit from Twitter, absolutely. And Facebook and blogs are different: blogs help you reach out to your current users, and Facebook Pages are built to let you attract fans. I guess that's not the misusage I was thinking about: I referred more to the spammers and the people who sign up for every service imaginable just to attract people. (The owner of AllFacebook, which I used to write for, did that a lot on Twitter, and it always just seemed slightly wannabe to me.)
lemonysnicket 18y ago
So a guy who presumably makes his living on being a professional blogger is lamenting the lost of the personal touch in blogs... hmm
phil_KartMe 18y ago
writing a blog can demonstrate your subject matter expertise to investors, employees, and business partners. philmichaelson.com has very small readership, but the leads its generated have already been worth the effort. Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook don't allow you to share the same length and quality of content outside your friend network
awt 18y ago
How about this: kill your blog if it sucks and no-one reads it and you can't think of any improvements you could make to get people to read it.
MicahWedemeyer 18y ago
Please do quit if your goal is to bask in the adoration of other bloggers. If you've got useful information or clever insight, by all means continue. For god's sake, I wouldn't know how to program these days without all the "5 steps to XXX" blog posts out there.
marketer 18y ago
Although this is a worthy topic to explore, the reasons the article mentions are are lousy. So what if there are people making a living blogging? Who cares if Jason Calacanis or Scoble changed their blogging patterns? Who cares about all the noise in the blogosphere, and competing services like Twitter. The most valid reason is that blogging is hard, and most people aren't willing to put forth the effort to make their blogs readable.
fallentimes 18y ago
This is awful advice. Our blog has, on some days, received more traffic than our actual site. In addition to generating sales, it has also helped us substantially with SEO and connecting with our users. This is quite possibly the worst advice I've ever seen on HN in recent memory. Just because you can use facebook/twitter et al doesn't mean you can't have a blog. They aren't mutually exclusive. One word of caution, if you're spending tons of time on your blog with very little to show for it, maybe consider getting rid of it or cut down your post frequency.
fallentimes 18y ago
"Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths." "Paul Boutin (paul@valleywag.com) is a correspondent for the Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag." This made me giggle even though I sometimes view Valleywag as having more journalistic integrity than TC.
markessien 18y ago
You need your blog, because it's part of your portfolio. It's what people who want to find out more about you read.
tlrobinson 18y ago
What a linkbait title. Blogs aren't going anywhere, people are just figuring out what's appropriate on their blog versus Twitter/Facebook/[insert social network site of month here]. Personally, I see my blog and Twitter feed as two very different types of communication. Twitter, etc is great for quick little comments, sharing links, short updates of what's going on my life, questions to friends, etc, whereas my blog is good for more in depth posts like technical projects I'm working on, longer opinion pieces, tips and tricks, etc. Similarly, I hate reading individual's blogs that simply talk about their boring day to day life, but 140 character chunks of that stuff is ok. On the flip side, there's no way to fit anything substantial (like my typical blog post) into 140 characters. "A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day." My approach is to not to subscribe to these kind of high volume "professional" blogs, but rather lots of little low traffic blogs. I figure if there's something truly important posted on one of these mega-blogs my peers will inevitably post about it (on their blog, Twitter, or Facebook) and I'll find out about it anyway. Plus I'll see a huge variety of posts and little gems that never make it up to the big guys, rather than a zillion "xyz company released abc cell phone" posts on Engadget. I'm a gadget fiend but that shit gets old after awhile. So don't let Wired and the mega-blogs discourage you from blogging. If you write something interesting the big guys will link to you anyway. My blog has been linked to from Slashdot, Daring Fireball, Ajaxian, TUAW, etc over the last year, and I only post about once a week when I have something I think is at least moderately interesting. </rant>
mattmaroon 18y ago
He makes the mistake of thinking there's some limited number of blog readers and you have to compete against TechCrunch for them. Also Calcanis may have quit blogging, but his posts now end up on top 10 blogs every time.
rockstar9 18y ago
clearly a flamebait ...
nir 18y ago
Shiny object!!!
dimitar 18y ago
What is this blog thing? A site with a RSS feed? The BBC website has RSS and news aren't posted in batches. So is it a blog? Nope. Isn't a blog supposed to be personal? The mentioned sites aren't really blogs, so the article is irrelevant. Blogs still matter when it comes to details that aren't discussed in the media. In my native language blog posts and forum discussions are among the top results and I often learn more and understand my country better from this content than from the PR-dominated media. I am glad that some of the bloggers I read have started micro-blogging - I am not interested in reading what they ate for dinner last night. I like traditional personal webpages.
nocivus 18y ago
I totally disagree. I don't see the point in stopping to write web log entries just because twitter or facebook exist. I do not write on my web log in search of some form of hype. The reason I do write on it, is to serve two purposes: To keep track of stuff that I know I will eventually forget (and it will be extra fun to re-read it later :)), and to communicate some form of information to my friends and family. Maybe, now that I think of it, it might be more interesting to start storing carrier pigeons or messages inside bottles, hmmmm...

36 points by narendra 18y ago

In the programming world, there is a healthy ecosystem of bloggers. If Steve Yegge switches to Twitter, I quit. One great thing about the web is that you can structure your content however you want.

henning 18y ago

If you want to share medium-sized amounts of timely information, blogs and screencasts are the best conduits that I know of. As for "expressing yourself" with Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, photos, throwing pillows at people, and 140 character ephemera do not substitute for a solid, well-edited blog post.

adnam 18y ago
"The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter." One word: SUBMARINE.

IsaacSchlueter 18y ago

I think Paul Boutin might have a crush on me. some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack Um... "foohack" is only used by one troll, afaik, and I'm not anonymous. :P http://tr.im/h9f http://tr.im/h9f This is the same Paul Boutin who was so impressed by my resume. http://tr.im/h9g http://tr.im/h9g

daveambrose 18y ago
Was there ever a follow-up story to the VW post on your resume?
- IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
  No, not that I know of. Though I did get pinged randomly by a yahoo employee from china who saw the story and looked me up in the corporate directory.
fallentimes 18y ago
Is that the old guy who wears sunglasses at night or?

randrews 18y ago

A dissenting opinion: Writing a blog helps you organize your thoughts, improves your writing skills, and teaches you to make good arguments (and recognize bad ones). None of that requires having an audience. At least an audience larger than your friends and coworkers. If you like to write, don't stop writing because it's not "where the buzz is at". There's more to life than following trends.

acgourley 18y ago
Well said. In addition to that, I use my blog to host content I hope people will find via google, like how-tos or coding gotchas. I'm not going to post a coding trick to my facebook account, even if it has more active readers.
- randrews 18y ago
  Exactly. Some content, like status updates, is perfect for Twitter or Facebook, but this article seems to assume that that's all anyone uses blogs for. Please god say it ain't so. I would like to think that people who keep blogs (at least the subset thereof that also read Wired) tend to write more interesting things in them, and I can't imagine that being replaced by 140 characters (this notwithstanding: http://twitter.com/_why/statuses/881768089 http://twitter.com/_why/statuses/881768089 )
  - alex_c 18y ago
    If this is actually a ploy to get pointless blogs out of Google's index and hidden behind Facebook's garden wall, then I'm all for it!
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
You can also write in your blog for your great-great-great-grandkids -- family that hasn't been born yet. Or you can write as a way of organizing book material. Or you can write as a way to keep and share memories with just a few people. Blogging is an internal thing first, external second.

brlewis 18y ago

He assumes blogs make media hard to upload. Posterous breaks that rule. Then there's my site, OurDoings, where the photos you upload form the skeleton of a blog, backdated by when the photos were taken. You can leave it as just photos or fill it in with as much writing as you want.

senihele 18y ago

Why are they mutually exclusive? Seems like they each work best when supported by everything else. The defining characteristic of 2008 is not twitter, as it was blogging in 2004, but rather the growing interconnectivity of all web services.

raganwald 18y ago

Kill your blog? Say it aint so! http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/07/brief-history-of-dangerous-ideas.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/07/brief-history-of-dangero...

MikeCapone 18y ago

They're just trying to be sensationalistic. To each his own. If you prefer the blog format, by all means keep blogging. If you prefer twitter, go do that..

benbeltran 18y ago
exactly what I was thinking... Soo, just because some people stop blogging and move to other platforms everyone should? Screw that. Of course, if you intend to use your blog to make some dinero and pay some of the bills, it's probably not going to work... but neither will twitter or facebook for that matter. If you just want to express yourself, use whatever you want and whatever your public will use. And can't you have a blog AND twitter, facebook, etc?

cstejerean 18y ago

And stop writing books people, it's so 1900. Surely you can convey everything you'd write about in a series of 140 char twitter messages.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
unalone 18y ago
I think that books have lost prominence, though. People have found that there are mediums that convey their messages far better. The book isn't dead. But it's not as used now as it was in the past. People with visions and dreams find that it's easier to make movies, or form bands. Some people write, yes, but the book is not as dominant as it was in 1900. The same stands for the play and the concerto. Blogs still have their uses. But now, things exist that work better for a lot of people. Twitter and Tumblr come to mind immediately.
- jamesbritt 18y ago
  " People with visions and dreams find that it's easier to make movies, or form bands. Some people write, yes, but the book is not as dominant as it was in 1900. The same stands for the play and the concerto." Any references to back this up? I bet it's easier to self-publish a book than it is to make a movie.
  - unalone 18y ago
    I self-published a book in my senior year of high school, so yes. That's possible. However, I referred to the set of genres overall. The book certainly is not dead. However, it takes up less of the "fine arts" market proportionally than it did a hundred years ago, and that's because other genres exist that allow people certain other freedoms. It is easier to form a band now than it was a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, it would have been extremely difficult, and there was less of a popular focus. There wasn't the insane level of attention to rock stars back then. And motion pictures didn't exist at all. Neither did animated pictures or video games. This is applicable to the blogging situation as follows: 5 years ago, if you wanted to write online, a blog was the best way to go. Now? Not necessarily. Now you can Tweet if that serves your purpose, or you can maintain a videolog or a tumblelog. Many friends of mine abandoned their blogs for Tumblr for precisely that reason: it fits their needs. And yes, that's still technically a blog, but the format has changed. There are different rules and there is focus on different things. It's entirely different from maintaining a blog on Wordpress or Movable Type. Nowadays, I don't see very many interesting posts from personal blogs. The blog posts I DO find interesting come from only a few places. The attention has changed to a variety of different mediums. Look at r/bestof/ on Reddit: suddenly, there are people who come to attention entirely through metaposting. Or, to take my example, I now link to my HN threads on my site and I've abandoned my blog for essays. It lets me build up a better relation between content that I write on the fly and content that builds up, that I slowly formulate and revise. Of course the book isn't dead, or even dying, though in my opinion it's been 50 years since the last truly revolutionary piece of pure literature (Beckett). However, now if you've got a mind for expression there are more writing-based venues available. 100 years ago, you either wrote poetry, wrote novels, or wrote plays. Now you have lyric writing, film-writing, and game writing available. That fits what people want much more. Look at the invention of science fiction: when movies first appeared, literature stopped dealing with sci-fi largely for several decades, because the minds that were attracted to sci-fi were attracted to cinema. The same thing is happening with video games right now: not all but many writers are joining on the science fiction game bandwagon. And so, if I were a game designer looking at a bunch of college students interested in science fiction, I might very well advise the students that novel writing might NOT be the best way to go on with sci-fi. Some people would ignore that and go on and try, but with so many other venues available, there's less of a pressure for books. That's how I see this article: it's an argument that a blog isn't necessary anymore. That doesn't mean people won't like it, and use it, but it means that blogging is no longer the primary source of content on the Internet.

ivankirigin 18y ago

Gary V. had great advice: "people ask what social networking tools I should use ... twitter, jaiku, etc. The answer? Use all of them" There is nothing exclusive about twitter & blogging. You'll note those with the biggest personal brands and most followers are often bloggers. This is because facebook and twitter are both bad at content/person discovery. Blogging is a good way to let people find out who you are.

unalone 18y ago
Ugh. I dislike that advice very much. I'm not a fan of people who use social networking to advertise. I know there are practical benefits, but the idealist in me wishes that people wouldn't pick up media just to abuse it. Some things are great: I remember there was a comment here about somebody who complained about Comcast on Twitter and got an instant response. But I've seen too many people who use Twitter and Jaiku and Tumblr to post links back to their content and that's that, and I hate that. Of course, the idealist in me thinks that you shouldn't advertise in every venue possible, that you should work until you've got something so useful that word-of-mouth brings people in, and that's not entirely practical either.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Disclaimer: TicketStumbler uses Twitter, Facebook and Blogging What if you have people come to you instead of vice versa? For example, you never follow anyone on twitter you make people follow you. I agree that the spammers are a huge problem, but I think some of these tools can be used for good. I raged about Comcast on Twitter yesterday and they haven't done anything. Bastards.
  - unalone 18y ago
    The ones you mentioned are okay if you're using them decently. I can see why TicketStumbler would benefit from Twitter, absolutely. And Facebook and blogs are different: blogs help you reach out to your current users, and Facebook Pages are built to let you attract fans. I guess that's not the misusage I was thinking about: I referred more to the spammers and the people who sign up for every service imaginable just to attract people. (The owner of AllFacebook, which I used to write for, did that a lot on Twitter, and it always just seemed slightly wannabe to me.)

lemonysnicket 18y ago

So a guy who presumably makes his living on being a professional blogger is lamenting the lost of the personal touch in blogs... hmm

phil_KartMe 18y ago

writing a blog can demonstrate your subject matter expertise to investors, employees, and business partners. philmichaelson.com has very small readership, but the leads its generated have already been worth the effort. Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook don't allow you to share the same length and quality of content outside your friend network

awt 18y ago

How about this: kill your blog if it sucks and no-one reads it and you can't think of any improvements you could make to get people to read it.

MicahWedemeyer 18y ago

Please do quit if your goal is to bask in the adoration of other bloggers. If you've got useful information or clever insight, by all means continue. For god's sake, I wouldn't know how to program these days without all the "5 steps to XXX" blog posts out there.

marketer 18y ago

Although this is a worthy topic to explore, the reasons the article mentions are are lousy. So what if there are people making a living blogging? Who cares if Jason Calacanis or Scoble changed their blogging patterns? Who cares about all the noise in the blogosphere, and competing services like Twitter. The most valid reason is that blogging is hard, and most people aren't willing to put forth the effort to make their blogs readable.

fallentimes 18y ago

This is awful advice. Our blog has, on some days, received more traffic than our actual site. In addition to generating sales, it has also helped us substantially with SEO and connecting with our users. This is quite possibly the worst advice I've ever seen on HN in recent memory. Just because you can use facebook/twitter et al doesn't mean you can't have a blog. They aren't mutually exclusive. One word of caution, if you're spending tons of time on your blog with very little to show for it, maybe consider getting rid of it or cut down your post frequency.

fallentimes 18y ago

"Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths." "Paul Boutin (paul@valleywag.com) is a correspondent for the Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag." This made me giggle even though I sometimes view Valleywag as having more journalistic integrity than TC.

markessien 18y ago

You need your blog, because it's part of your portfolio. It's what people who want to find out more about you read.

tlrobinson 18y ago

What a linkbait title. Blogs aren't going anywhere, people are just figuring out what's appropriate on their blog versus Twitter/Facebook/[insert social network site of month here]. Personally, I see my blog and Twitter feed as two very different types of communication. Twitter, etc is great for quick little comments, sharing links, short updates of what's going on my life, questions to friends, etc, whereas my blog is good for more in depth posts like technical projects I'm working on, longer opinion pieces, tips and tricks, etc. Similarly, I hate reading individual's blogs that simply talk about their boring day to day life, but 140 character chunks of that stuff is ok. On the flip side, there's no way to fit anything substantial (like my typical blog post) into 140 characters. "A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day." My approach is to not to subscribe to these kind of high volume "professional" blogs, but rather lots of little low traffic blogs. I figure if there's something truly important posted on one of these mega-blogs my peers will inevitably post about it (on their blog, Twitter, or Facebook) and I'll find out about it anyway. Plus I'll see a huge variety of posts and little gems that never make it up to the big guys, rather than a zillion "xyz company released abc cell phone" posts on Engadget. I'm a gadget fiend but that shit gets old after awhile. So don't let Wired and the mega-blogs discourage you from blogging. If you write something interesting the big guys will link to you anyway. My blog has been linked to from Slashdot, Daring Fireball, Ajaxian, TUAW, etc over the last year, and I only post about once a week when I have something I think is at least moderately interesting. </rant>

mattmaroon 18y ago

He makes the mistake of thinking there's some limited number of blog readers and you have to compete against TechCrunch for them. Also Calcanis may have quit blogging, but his posts now end up on top 10 blogs every time.

rockstar9 18y ago

clearly a flamebait ...

nir 18y ago

Shiny object!!!

dimitar 18y ago

What is this blog thing? A site with a RSS feed? The BBC website has RSS and news aren't posted in batches. So is it a blog? Nope. Isn't a blog supposed to be personal? The mentioned sites aren't really blogs, so the article is irrelevant. Blogs still matter when it comes to details that aren't discussed in the media. In my native language blog posts and forum discussions are among the top results and I often learn more and understand my country better from this content than from the PR-dominated media. I am glad that some of the bloggers I read have started micro-blogging - I am not interested in reading what they ate for dinner last night. I like traditional personal webpages.

nocivus 18y ago

I totally disagree. I don't see the point in stopping to write web log entries just because twitter or facebook exist. I do not write on my web log in search of some form of hype. The reason I do write on it, is to serve two purposes: To keep track of stuff that I know I will eventually forget (and it will be extra fun to re-read it later :)), and to communicate some form of information to my friends and family. Maybe, now that I think of it, it might be more interesting to start storing carrier pigeons or messages inside bottles, hmmmm...