THE BLOG IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BLOG

Yesterday I was looking through my blog bookmarks. I think at the very peak, some 2 years ago, I had around 300 blogs marked. So many that I have them saved them in folders alphabetically. Now I have less than 150, I still have more to remove but I'm holding onto them purely for nostalgic reasons (sad I know). The reason I've been removing them is that those particular blogs have died a silent death. Blogs like Clusterflock and Clublife have ended because the owners/authors have simply stopped posting in them. Others like Waiter Rant have just become erratic posters, with barely a post. This is all a bit sad, sad for someone like me who loves blogs. Good blogs that is, they're hard to find.

So why has or is this happening? I guess for a multitude of reasons really. Let's just look at those three as examples. 

Clusterflock just felt it was time to move on, to do something else. So they announced a while back that it was time to shut up shop. 

Waiter Rant was so huge and so well written that inevitably the author scored a book deal, he appeared on Oprah and his book spent five weeks on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list in 2008. I bought that book, it was hilarious. Now he works in a hospital. His blog has lost its source of fresh stories, the bistro he managed, he's married and had a child. Life changes, priorities change and the blog pays the price. That's life, it happens that life thing and like us every blog has a start and end date.

Then there's Clublife, an awesome blog about a guy who worked as a doorman/bouncer in a bunch of New York night clubs. He mostly wrote about Guidos. Insanely funny at times, he too scored a book deal. That was the death of that blog, are you sensing a theme here? Well sadly this story is a bit more complicated than that. The author spent less time on his blog and eventually moved it across to another host, changed the focus of his writing and then as I found out yesterday ... he died. Yeah, he died in his early forties. I'm not sure how or what from, but he's dead. I felt like I knew him a bit, connected through reading his posts and his book, yet I knew very little about him. In fact by googling him yesterday I learnt a lot more about him and his many persona than I had known when he was blogging.

So three different and yet connected reasons for a blog closing or winding down. But I wonder if that's the most common reason for the death of the blog. Is it more because of, and I think this to be true, the rise of social media? Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have all kind of made everyone who uses these platforms into a blogger of sorts. Only that term isn't used to describe what they do, but it sort of actually does describe what they/we do. I've been posting on this blog for almost 10 years now (wow!) and I too have embraced all three of those alternate platforms. The difference between what blogs do and social media does has disappeared. They are but one.

So which of these four platforms attracts the most interaction? Not this blog, it's possibly the weakest of all of them (still my fav though). Sadly I fear the platform that is the blog is dying, if it's not already dead. Maybe if I'm among the last of the few left standing when Facebook eventually buys Twitter and re-brands itself as Facegramitter the remaining blogs will become cool safe havens away from the mega decca corp that social media will become. Ha, I too will probably be dead by then. The blog is dead, long live the blog.