blogging (becomes ordinary)

A couple recent items on the changes to blogging.
Once you strip the hype away, they both basically say that blogging is a part of the commodity infrastructure of the Internet now, it's just one communication option.  This is not too surprising, considering that blogging will reach its 10th anniversary next year (by my estimation anyway, see end of previous post for more info).  10 years, that's what, 70 years in Internet time?

Blogging: not dead, just resting.  Just an experienced old man, actually.

I've found that as I'm using Twitter and FriendFeed more, I'm doing more content consumption and less content generation, which is unfortunate.  I don't plan to deal with this by going as far as Steven Cohen and deleting my lifestreaming accounts, but I have recognized a need to blog more.

It's also interesting the way that FriendFeed in particular changes how I use other services - for example I had to change my delicious postings to clearly indicate when a quote was from the site being blogged (a "pullquote") - otherwise it was confusing for people to read in my FF that "I have created this wonderful new thing" when the "I" was actually the person on the site I was quoting, not me.  (Unfortunately, unlike Furl, delicious doesn't provide any separate fields to distinguish between a Comment about the item and a Clipping from the item.)

Wired has a typically hyperbolic piece in Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.

Wired Magazine - 16.11

and the Economist has a piece that concludes rather reasonably

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.

Blogging grows up - The Economist magazine - November 6, 2008

So, from an item I read in the print Wired, to the Economist item which I found via FriendFeed.

Which is to say, it's not paper vs. digital or blogs versus lifestreams, it's all technologies, as appropriate.

UPDATE 2008-11-09: From the brilliant mind of Hugh Macleod, April 17, 2007

Cartoon via Twitter fan wiki http://twitter.pbwiki.com/

UPDATE 2008-11-21: title and slight content alterations due to unfortunate search hits.