Just been reading an article over at The Register entitled “Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live“. An interesting point of view, but in my view it’s utter bollocks. How can he even predict what will be happening in 10 years time?
OK, so a blog as we know it today may not be the type of blog we see in ten years time, but people will still want to write what they do and feel on a regular basis.
Blogs are no more than web sites. Before ‘blogs’ people would create there own web pages about what they wanted to talk about. Web Logs was the term used to describe them, the term Blog came about and scripts were created to make creating regular updates easier, but they are still just web sites, and web sites aren’t going to die in 10 years.
Blogs have become community driven, bloggers link to other blogs, and the word is spread. OK, there are a lot of blogs that do a lot of linking, but not much talking. There are bizarre blogs, weird blogs, rubbish blogs, pointless blogs and of course, really good blogs, some of the more pointless ones may dwindle and die but there is still going to be blogs in one form or another.
Apparently Bruce said “You are never going to see a painting by committee that is a great painting,”. That may be true, but I don’t think you can compare blogs to a painting in that way as they serve different purposes. Paintings are there to please and show what the author was feeling at the time of creating it. Emotion and feeling are part of it.
While bloggers do put their emotion and feeling into their posts, and share their views (just like I’m doing here) it would be a pretty boring thing if there weren’t views from others and discussion about what the blogger is saying. That is what the community is great for, and that is why it will continue in some form long beyond 2017.