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Blogging Will Be Replaced By Twitter And Facebook And Flickr

10 Things That WON'T Happen In 2009

Start The Discussion | bMighty Staff | January 07, 2009 07:05 AM

Everybody and his brother has predicted what will happen in 2009. That wasn't good enough for bMighty -- we decided to buck conventional wisdom and tell you about 10 important things that won't happen this year. Don't say we didn't warn you...

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Blogging Will Be Replaced By Twitter And Facebook And Flickr

Credit Wired for this ridiculous idea. Back in October, Valleywag correspondent Paul Boutin decided that the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr made blogs look "so 2004." And the idea was immediately picked up and spread via... wait for it... the blogosphere.

Here's the idea: "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."

It's an interesting idea as far as it goes. Social networking sites like Facebook offer a variety ways to communicate within a group. Flickr and YouTube make it easy to go beyond the written word and share pictures and videos. And micro-blogging service Twitter is faster and easier than blogging. All true, and there's no doubt that the popularity of those sites and other like them will continue to grow.

But their rise has nothing to do with the future of blogging. Despite some success selling bread in Ireland, social networking doesn't replace blogs any more than blogs replaced Web sites. In fact, the reasoning behind the dis of blogging is really just that the medium has become too popular, too mainstream. As The Economist put it recently, blogging is no longer revolutionary.

But that hardly means it's dead.

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