Friday, July 18, 2008

It's the End of Blogging as We Know It, Part II

The interesting coda to Jason Calcanis' "retirement" from blogging because he says blogging is dead.

In addition to his new email outlet, he continues to use Twitter.

I guess Twitter, or microblogging, is not dead -- yet.

Until something else supplants it.

Here's an additional point: it's taken a long time for print to get to its current stage: on-the-edge-of-doom. But it might not actually die, and go the way of buggy whips.

Radio continues to survive long after it was written off with the advent of TV.

But I'd bet that Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites vanish before print and radio do, if only because print and radio have a long tradition. Although they tend to be older, there are lots of people who like the feel of the ink smudging their fingers as they flip the pages of their morning paper.

I use Twitter, but Twitter is the latest trend. There's not much heritage to it yet, and while people who use it can seem to be obsessed with Twitter, the vast majority of people even in the tech sector are not using Twitter. Perhaps Twitter adoption is still in its infancy.

But if blogging is dead, how much longer can Twitter expect to live? Or, if it does survive, with its limit of 140-character messages, what does that say about our attention span?

(PS: I don't think blogging is quite dead yet.)

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