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.
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