Time for a bold prediction: Blogging will make a comeback in 2010.
Well, a comeback of sorts; perhaps a resurgence, or maybea second wave. Blogging won’t return to where it was, a few years ago, before the explosion of social media. The dynamics have changed. For some, Twitter ate their blog, for many of the rest, the rythmn of checking in on people’s blogs is broken,
“No, I’m not keeping up with your blog. Like a good friend said to me a couple of years ago, “Man, I don’t even have time to read the blogs of my good friends anymore.” Ditto with me. Heck, it’s hard enough keeping up with my good friends’ Twitter streams.”
In fact, Hugh’s thoughts on the state of the blogosphere today hold a key for the future. Creating good blog content is hard, which is why so many people have left the platform – unable to sustain the demand for content or find an audience for their writing.
However, Twitter and Facebook are very limited vehicles for holding content – that is not their strength.
If you have creative output, you need a place to host it, explain it and maybe invite comment on it. On that level blogging still makes sense. Content-specific platforms, like Flickr (photos) and Soundcloud (music) are great hosts but limited content and commentary platforms. If you have a story to tell, about your life, or work or product, a sustained story, then blogging is still a compelling platform.
Because, as I’ve always said, blogging is ultimately all about self-publishing.
But, blogging is not for everyone – this drive is not part of everyone’s personality. Blogging is a public art and in a way social media has cleared the path for it to become more elite. I’m saving some thoughts on the pros and cons of this for later posts. But, for now, I wanted to focus on two ways I see blogging changing fast.
Comments
Back in 02-05, comments were the fuel that drove a lot of bloggers. Today, comment-traffic is way down and I don’t see this trend being reversed anytime soon.
Reflecting on the death of blog comments, Binary Bonsai wrote,
“Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.
Those days are gone, and a new batch have arrived, where if I write that I’m eating a strawberry pie on Facebook, it’ll get more replies than if I dig up a super-rare interview with George Lucas and write about it on my blog… What’s a man to do?”
There appear to be no elegant solutions for pulling comments into blogs from other platforms and creating active, cross-platform conversations. Maybe this will change in the future, but for now, as bloggers, we should just focus on our content and accept that comments in the old sense, are a gift when they come.
Technology
Part of why I am bullish about blogs, is because I’m bullish about the iPad and the future of tablet computers. Facebook and Twitter got a huge shot in the arm from advanced mobile phone technology.
Portability sparked the growth in social media, because it allowed us to post from anywhere and 140 characters doesn’t feel like much of a limitation when writing from a phone. In an interesting reversal of trend, the tablet provides portability but the ability to handle the richer and deeper content that blogs require.
There you have it – in 2010 blogs will rise again, without comments and fuelled by tablets like the iPad.
Jason Parker is a Jazz trumpeter and has a great blog called One Working Musician. Yesterday he posted Grammys: That’s Not MY Music Industry, which in many ways resonated with my feelings about this high profile US awards show. Jason writes,
“…they might call that the Music Industry, but that has nothing to do with what I do as a working musician. I have been a professional musician for 15 years, and it’s been my sole job for 9 of those years. But whatever that was on the TV tonight, that’s not even close to my world.”
It’s a point that bears repeating, over and over. For many, when they think of the music business, or the viability of music as a business or career their mind turns to events like the Grammys and the (very) small number of (highly publicised) celebrities that are showcased there. Amazingly, otherwise thoughtful adults still view the music business through this filter and still let this thinking influence what they say to young kids who are interested in following a musical future.
I’m fortunate to know a number of people my age or older who are serious musicians. These are not dropouts or loafers, but serious hardworking people with all the usual “adult” responsibilities (homes, families, mortgages, businesses, etc). Some have never written anything other than musician on their tax returns, others have held professional roles in music alongside other careers and some, like me, have returned to full-time music after exploring other vocations.
Whilst a few may be loosely connected to the kind of music we see at the Grammys (either as session players, engineers, or arrangers, or the like), that “industry” does not reflect our “industry.” Comparing the Grammys to the music business the rest of us participate in is like comparing McDonalds to your favourite local cafe or diner.
Moreover, it’s worth remembering that the big glossy end of the industry is changing fast. Consider Peter’s thoughts over at Create Digital Music – Sorry, Majors: “Indie” Artists, Labels Clean Up Again at Grammys. Even at this major label oriented event, independent and smaller labels triumphed. Moreover, one of the most lauded artists, Imogen Heap who although signed to major label operates almost totally with a DIY, small label approach to her music-making and marketing.
That bears remembering because the music industry has dramatically changed in ways that favour ordinary working musicians, be performers, session players, arrangers, copyists, educators or trainers. MusicPowerNetwork is a great example of how to learn about these changes.
So, whilst the Grammys represent a part of the music industry it is not the whole story. A lot of people are making a good living from music far away from the borrowed luxury and hype of those kinds of awards shows – remember that next time a friend or child talks to you about their musical dreams.
As the article on the buzz put it (Does Anyone Still Care About The Grammys?)
“…it’s interesting, from a cultural studies / celebrity gossip sort of perspective, but not only is it stale musicially, it’s downright offensive to working musicians everywhere.”
Purely for fun, I’ve been taking photos with my iPhone and posting them on twitter, at the rate of about one a day. Chase Jarvis’s work on the The Best Camera project, together with his handy iPhone app, inspired me.
Of course, these photos have technical limitations. The iPhone camera can’t compare to a DLSR; but that isn’t the point. Every photo helps you frame the world and work on your composition, so it is all good practice.
That said, it is amazing how moody and atmospheric iPhone photos can be. Moreover, it is impressive how much ouy can do with an application running on the iPhone to do basic developing of the images.
And, if you have no other camera with you, there’s no reason not to use the iPhone and take the most creative image you can to remember an important day, or occasion.
You can see more of my iPhone photos here.
Sunday’s post, on the direction of my faith and church life over the last decade attracted a number of comments, here on the blog and via other channels. Suffice it to say some folks were genuinely worried about my level of “happiness.”
Whilst I appreciate that not being actively connected to a church and expressing some thoughts that could be considered “doubts” in public goes against the grain of a lot of the culture of contemporary evangelicalism I am, right now, a long way from being unhappy.
Sure, I could catalogue a number of things in my life that I wish were different. I live in a city where I have few friends, small networks and my career is not really “appreciated.” But compared to last year, things are better on every count. I’ve stuck with some changes and plans and they have paid off. I can’t say I love Hong Kong, but I don’t feel as alienated as I did this time last year.
Whilst I am not, as a writer or academic where I thought I would be ten years ago, I am writing regularly. My blog readership is slowly growing again (not that raw numbers ever meant much to me anyway). I finished a surprising good draft of a novella late last year and I’m finally enthusiastic again about some long term writing projects.
I’m also thrilled, on an almost daily basis by my renewed involvement in photography. I’m being asked to take photos and encouraged to think about doing more with the photos I take.
As for the question of faith, well I think that is a lot more humble and less oriented on happiness and safety. In a way, I think this recent post from Donald Miller reflects a lot of where I am at on that score right now.
All of which is my way of saying that Sunday’s post was not about how bad my life is, rather about how differently it has turned out compared to what I expected.
MacProVideo are my favourite providers of online tutorials for Logic and other software applications.
Last week they released a brief (free) tutorial explaining the benefits of Logic’s shift to 64 bit processing, in terms of memory handling. They demonstrated how many instansiations of the Sylus RMX plugin would crash Logic in 32 bit mode and now many more could be run on the same system in 64 bit mode.
The difference was staggering. If you are interested, I’ll leave you watch the video yourself here.
For those of us who run large projects in Logic, this is a significant development. Most top orchestrators run multiple computers in order to be able to effectively stream the vast number of samples required to simulate a real orchestra. With 64 bit and enough RAM, you can now bring that within a single high powered machine running multiple drives.
Whilst my bank manager is probably not excited by my new-found excuse to buy an extra 16GB of RAM, I’m thrilled that a software update has, in effect, made my Mac Pro far more powerful than it was a few weeks ago!