Most flagrant flamebait ever

Valleywag's Paul Boutin has an article up on Wired claiming that blogging is over (so 2004, dahling) because...well, like Mathew Ingram, I'm not altogether sure what the "because" is supposed to be. The existence of Twitter and Facebook, and the de facto retirement of Robert Scoble and Jason Calcanis from blogging qua blogging seem to be the thrust of the argument.

This is really just the old Radio Will Kill Books, TV Will Kill Radio argument - "oooh look, a shiny new thing. Everyone will use the shiny new thing and stop using the thing we had last week, and here are two (two!) whole examples of moderately well-known people doing just that very thing so it must be true for everyone".

I'm not linking to the thing. It's just flamebait, and if you want to read it you can see it hanging around on Techmeme gathering the storm of abuse it was clearly intended to generate. It is trivial to take a situation defined by asymmetric competition and redefine it as a straightforward dichotomy (sure, blogs compete with Twitter for time and attention but so does Everquest, The Godfather Trilogy, the books review section of the New York Times, fishing, building model aeroplanes and popping out for a quick pint) just so you can goad the most opinionated people in the world into linking back to you by saying their medium is dead. 

So I'm not playing. The article is nonsense, but it ain't getting a link.

Update: I should have thought of this, but I didn't so I tip my hat to Bob Warfield, who points out that if blogs were really over, no-one would bother baiting them. And so with his flamebait Paul Boutin is really confirming the importance of blogs. Nice point, well made.      

Comments

[Brendan]

Also interesting to announce it in a blogpost. Now if he had used the brevity of a tweet that would have been creative. Or did Twitter die and is the nex big thing smoke signals in Second Life? Anyway who are Scoble and Calacanis? The next Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Please. Techmeme sometimes seems like a geek gossip site.

[George Nimeh]

The irony is, of course, that the story is posted on Wired's blog. What's even more ridiculous is that Paul Boutin is a blogger for Valleywag. Essentially, this is a gossip blogger writing about how bad blogging is because there is so much gossip and crap on blogs.

http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2008/10/paul-boutin-doesn-get-social-media.html

[Tim Reha]

The post by Paul Boutin is total retardation.

A way smarter approach is to maintain your own Domain Name and branded website/blog.

Then leverage the 40+ web services and pull them back into your blog/website.

Then apply SEO techniques to your blog posts, twitters, etc. so you drive traffic to your own property. This will build your brand and give you control over your destiny.

Valleywag's Paul Boutin is a fool and glue-head, who is just trying to create waves to get readership.

Control your core brand and core blog/website. Leverage the newbie services that get hot then get COLD over time.

Cheers, Tim Reha

[Seamus McCauley]

Brendan - you should see Techmeme on a Sunday afternoon...

George - indeed.

Thanks for commenting guys.