The vaunted NY Times has an article today titled " Death of Blogs " which basically states that Blogging is passe and the youngsters are more influenced by Facebook and Twitter. Like I care about Facebook ( I don't) and/or Twitter (tweet away, not something I care about either)I have a message for the NY Times, it is two words long and it ain't " Happy Birthday ".
To the Editors of the NY Times, I can only quote Col. Nathan Jessup (from A Few Good Men) about what I expect from them and the rest of the establishment media:
" I can deal with the bullets, and the bombs, and the blood. I don't want money, and I don't want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there....and with your Harvard mouth extend me some ....courtesy."
I was going to write a long elegant piece here about how they can all take a flying leap but one of my fellow Bloggers did a much better job and saved me the time.
To the editors of the NY Times, I say YOU are the ones who don't matter anymore. That is why your newspaper is going down the tubes. I like reading the daily paper but the Internet relegated the newspapers to the dustbin 10 years ago....
So read on my Blog Fans.....I enjoy writing my daily thoughts and highlighting ideas/concepts/thoughts that I feel are worth sharing, and based on the number of people who read this milblog (10-12K per month), you do also. I write this for my own personal satisfaction and don't care if the youth demographic doesn't get it....I'm not writing for them.
I am glad to have you along and once more to the NY Times......Retire...and get out of the way.
The New York Times declares blogs are dead
From JrDeputyAccountant.com
I'm not surprised the NYT would go out on a limb and let out a premature death call on the blogosphere's heartbeat, attempting to reign in those unruly readers who have defected to bask in the wild wonderland that is blogging. Really?
Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.
The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.
Really?
As one such dinosaur who still blogs, I don't even know where to begin with this NYT piece. Maybe I'm too busy to write a lengthy criticism of everything wrong about this article or just another lazy blogger who can't bring myself to do any research or make any valid points outside of my own opinion. Maybe the bile is rising in my throat so quickly that I can't sit by my laptop long enough to pound it out. Hopefully the future gets here soon so I can get that WiFi-enabled toilet bowl I've always wanted.
Since when do 12-year-olds define an entire ecosystem? My bread and butter as a blogger comes from advertising revenue, including my gig at Going Concern (which consists of advertising I, thankfully, do not have to get my hands dirty with), and last I checked, I wasn't writing for 12-year-olds. In fact, if any 12-year-olds are reading this I respectfully request that you ......go over to Club Penguin or Justin Bieber's myspace page so the grown ups can talk amongst ourselves. Does the NYT write for 12-year-olds?
Don't answer that.
NYT continues:
Defining a blog is difficult, but most people think it is a Web site on which people publish periodic entries in reverse chronological order and allow readers to leave comments.
Yet for many Internet users, blogging is defined more by a personal and opinionated writing style. A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources.
Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval.
No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do.
I'm sorry but I'm not going to put my Internet eggs in Facebook's diabolical basket, regardless of what the social mediatards say. Facebook, in this blogger's humble opinion, is for connecting with people I actually know, most of whom don't care about economics or my opinion thereof. Twitter, on the other hand, is a medium of communication to advance my blogging goals, not the be all end all of the conversation. As NYT obviously figured out, there is a limitation on Twitter that doesn't apply to the blogosphere.
I refuse to believe that NYT actually believes blogs are dead and am a tad disappointed that they didn't try harder to sway public opinion if the goal is to get their former readers back to NYT and away from those dirty, nasty blogs.
Maybe the oversharing livejournal blog is dead and if that's the case, we're just as thrilled as the NYT but let's be sure we differentiate the livejournal blog from the independent writer who uses opinion to reflect on news that matters to said independent writer. Too bad hackery is alive and well, NYT. The attempt to demonize the competition is so obvious it's sad. I, for one, am not at all deterred by the New York Times pointing its shotgun at me telling me to get off the porch. It's a big porch and we all own it....
ROGER THAT.
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