So Paul Boutin, correspondent for Valleywag, has deemed that ‘Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004′ in an article penned for Wired:

“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…

…Further, text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth.”

In case Boutin hasn’t noticed, the purpose of all these tools is to enable users to share stuff that interests them - whether that be a link, a photo, a video, a tweet, a lengthy blog post or any other piece of content, how they do it is wholly irrelevant. What tool they use to do it is irrelevant. It’s the same behaviour.

And in any case, most people aren’t using these as an either / or choice - they’re choosing to mix and match different tools and services to let them publish different forms of content in the way that suits them best. The fact that Jason Calcanis has ditched his blog because it became “simply too big, too impersonal” for him doesn’t mean that blogging’s dead. It just means that as someone with a hugely public online profile found that actually how he wanted to interact with others online changed.

Boutin goes on to say that today’s bloggers are “expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times” - which may be true for a commercial blogger whose salary depended on the traffic his blog posts generated, but this doesn’t make it the rule for the rest of the blogosphere. So to say that Twitter is better than blogging because the character limit puts everyone back on equal footing, letting “amateurs quit agonising over their writing and cut to the chase” seems bloody ludicrous. Especially because it’s the same bloody behaviour.

Sweeping generalisation, anyone?

[ image courtesy gapingvoid ]