YouTube killed the Blogging star?

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The suffix at the end of the modern age of Internetz, 2.0, was originally coined as the second version of the Internet. But alas, it has been taken, not in a chronological sense, but in the speed of which time apparently passes, I even read of the apparent Web 3.0 coming up soon.  This speed, it seems, is effecting even the media on the Internet.

Paul Boutin of Wired Magazine is one of that ideas RSS subscribers.  Except it doesn’t have a feed, its just a bad pun.

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

Paul Boutin @ http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay

The original idea behind blogging was the simplicity behind it, most everyone (even a few monkeys) were able to easily type and publish their own commentary, “part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips” claimed Boutin. Take any look at the currently thriving blogs and you will see that is no longer the case.  Blogging was a recycling of old trends, as radio was replaced by television for similar reasons.  Unlike The Buggles would have you believe, however, video did not kill the radio star, it just had him slim down a bit and move from family rooms to their minivans.

But what do you wake up to?  What do you not wake up to?  What do you smack every morning, only to smack it again in 8 minutes?  For this questionnaire to work, if we remove spouses from the equation (and annoying birds/ children) we are left with the answer: radio.  Video is an ironically horrible killer.

I use that example because I like the song, its catchy, poppy and covered more often than Britney Spears is not.  I do agree that blogging will not stay a dormant idea, as was the case of radio and theatres, but similarly, they are going nowhere.  As with the move of radio from family room to car, movie from theatre to family room, blogging is just going to specialize itself.

As with most ideas, especially Interweb ones, blogging has been done to death.  LiveJournal was the first one I remember hearing about, and looking back on my old (and since deleted) accounts, I thought myself actually retarded.  To a pre-teen, blogging was just a rant and a rave and a tear-fest about how horrible their parents are, and either ridiculously long diatribes, or short, mid-tear posts of gloom.  But really, near the end, LiveJournals were either abandoned or just a painful spam of few-sentence rants.  The idea of a micro-blog was ripe for the picking, and although I am sure they were not the first, Twitter really got the cheese roll of that idea some mad speeds.

But that is how the Internet seems to work.  The idea of blogging has been, for the past few years, overused, and in the past fewer years the idea has been specialized and socialized.  You ever watch movies based in the past?  Say, one of the bi-yearly racial-issue-football movies?  Or even so, the war movies?  Back in those days, radio was the form of communication and media.  But then TV came out and took the majority of the radio market, and what did it do?  It specialized itself, and moved the radio into a commuter media.  Micro-blogging is the specialized turd-blogging.

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. You’ll find Scoble, Calacanis, and most of their buddies from the golden age there. They claim it’s because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.

This argument reminds me, but with a little bit more credibility all of the * killers.  But alas, Digg is still around, the iPod is still around, Firefox is still around.  And y’know what?  Blogging will never die, just like how Newspaper never died.  It changed, not died.

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