Press "Enter" to skip to content

Taking the Linkbait about Blogging

Paul Boutin has a linkbait article up at Wired, about why you shouldn’t bother blogging. My response is:

Don’t blog to get known, blog to be knowable.

Twitter, identi.ca et al are great, and certainly they’ve eaten into bog posting significantly; the pros have (of course, what did you expect?) moved into what used to be a wild & wooly amateur haven. But that doesn’t remove the importance of blogging for all sorts of significant things, not least of which is a platform to write long reasoned arguments about topics that are relevant to you.

From a more mercenary view though: if I am evaluating someone as a potential business partner, client, service provider, etc, I want to be able to trust them. There are a few ways of trusting someone: knowing them, getting a good recommendation about them, or knowing about them.

When I am researching a person, a company, a product, I want to be able to go somewhere like a blog to poke around, read up on their thinking and opinions, a place where I can get to know them, what interests them, what they are like. No other platform – not facebook, twitter or anywhere else – comes close to a blog for giving me immediate comfort about & trust in someone I know nothing about.

Mitch has some thoughts on the topic too.

6 Comments

  1. adriana adriana 2008-10-21

    Thank you for making this very valuable point.

    Considering the amount of traffic I’ve managed to attract by offering Facebook status line suggestions, I have very little faith in the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am value of Facebook or Twiiter.

    Good blogging requires reflection and observations – two things that cannot be properly expressed through status lines or updates.

  2. Hugh Hugh 2008-10-22

    It’s a question of what you are doing and why. If connecting with people is the objective, then Twitter, Identica, Facebook are great. If you have some larger reason for writing, then you need a larger space to do it.

  3. adriana adriana 2008-10-22

    Hugh, we are on the same page.
    It also explains why I am rubbish at writing short stories. Not enough space.

  4. Ze Laurent Ze Laurent 2008-10-24

    Bonne nouvelle, le blogue est mort !…

    En rentrant de PodMtl hier soir, je vois ma femme attristée qui me sort «Ton Wired me dit que le blogue est mort. Que vais-je faire du mien ?». Wired n’est pas le premier à annoncer le dépassement du blogue, qui ne serait plus la saveur de l’a…

  5. […] from Hugh McGuire (LibriVox and The Book Oven). In the comments section of this Blog, Hugh said: "Don’t Blog to get known, Blog to be knowable." It’s not about Blogging with a tone of "look at me, look at me!" It’s about […]

Comments are closed.