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November 19, 2008

The end of Bookninja?

Can’t win. Don’t try. Got it. Blogging is over, I’m told. All I can say is, Phew.

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

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

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6 comments on “The end of Bookninja?”

  1. Joel Bass says:

    Hmm. So here’s a guy writing for Wired Magazine, lamenting that bloggers can’t possibly compete with online magazines? Is this a warning to stay off his turf?

  2. Mary Soderstrom says:

    So the subtext is: I think therefore I blog, but when I want to shoot of my mouth or my camera I go elsewhere.

    Okay, that’s fine with me.

    Mary

  3. Jonathan Dozier-Ezell says:

    Or you could blog anyway and feed your blog through facebook, friendfeed, myspace, etc. That’s what I’m doing. Just started a blog a couple of weeks ago, and I’m growing a slow but steady readership. I’m a fan of twitter, but I’m not sure pushing twitter as the next bastion of the literary grass-roots is going to earn anybody points. Based on this reasoning (shorter=easier=better), I think I’ll create a new site, twit.com, where you can only post ten letters and no vowels, where all q’s must be followed by wtf.

  4. Mark Benson says:

    The article uses flawed logic in that it assumes the intent of blogs to be to compete with The Huffington Post, Engadget, TreeHugger, and Wired, and also to make it into the Technorati top 100. This is certainly not true as a broad and sweeping generalization.

  5. Niteowl says:

    Call me a Pollyanna of the first order, a sunny-dispositioned, ‘glass is half full’ thinking, rose-tinted glass wearing, koolaid swilling rube; but there’s always room for ‘folksy self-expression and clever thought,’, no?

  6. Heather says:

    And they’re not even accounting for the knitblog phenomenon.

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