I have two articles which I cite in this post (see below)…They represent two qualities (in each). The first and most obvious quality is that they have been spun…that is, the title is quite inflammatory (as the two cited speakers are…). About all that you can reasonably draw from these two titles is that the editors of these pieces understand the herd aspect of marketing…
The less obvious, and quite honestly, far more interesting quality of these two posts relate to what could be seen as an attempt to look at online life in an historical manner.
The 2003 idea that everyone (and his brother) would be immersed in blogging as some sort of substitute for…personal interaction has been seen as an old fashioned view of blogging since…2005? Most of the personal bloggers out there have either:
- Gotten a life
- Moved over to Facebook
- Started writing about something beyond:
- Cats
- Personal emotional issues
- Other small animals
This is not a done deal in the blogosphere…yet. China has well over 45 million bloggers, and in an even broader sense, the line between blogs, journalism, tweets, and even sites representing some sort of expertise blur more every day.
The idea that ‘stupid people shouldn’t write’ comes off as more than a little oafish. I thought that if you were that stupid…you couldn’t write.
The old school ‘hello world’, grey on grey web pages of the early 90’s are moribund…Most people don’t even want to look at them as pieces of history. Correspondingly the assertion that increasing amounts of interaction and more sophisticated media being embedded in the vast majority of online content now (as with most of the last 5-8 years)is so obvious as to negate the need to have this notion presented as some sort of ‘insight’. Bear in mind that the trope that the ‘webpage will become a dead idea refers only to some sort of end user perspective on ‘static’ web pages, not upon the World Wide Web… Seen in this light, this is a trivial waste of a static page…
Jason Calacanis: "Blogging Is dead" & Why "Stupid People shouldn’t write"
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/jason_calcanis_blogging_is_dead_why_stupid_people.php
"Blogging is largely dead."
"There are a lot of stupid people out there … and stupid people shouldn’t write."
"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."
Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google’s Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.
Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.
"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."
Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.
"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."
The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn’t mean that anybody will be paying attention.
"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."
Five years from now, there’ll be no such thing as a webpage
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/14/five-years-from-now-there%E2%80%99ll-be-no-such-thing-as-a-webpage
Every time Facebook changes its interface, an outcry erupts in my News Feed. Without fail, my network transforms into a village and Mark Zuckerberg is our Frankenstein. Minor tweaks send us into an outrage, and we want Facebook’s head on a platter for our momentary confusion. But then a few days pass, and instead of anger, we see adaptation. The voices of dissent subside and we’re back to business as usual. After all, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who can recount exactly what the first Facebook profile was like. Furthermore, it’d be difficult to find someone who cares.
This, according to Jim Boulton of Story Worldwide, is the future of the Internet. In five years, we’ll be singing ‘Social Killed the Webpage Star.’ The rise of interactive, user-specific pages will replace the stationary web pages that were once the core of the Internet. The Internet will be undergoing constant metamorphosis, making it impossible to freeze in time. [That is, unless the concept behind the San Francisco based startup BO.LT takes off.]
“Five years from now, there’ll be no such thing as a webpage,” Boulton tells me. He’s the curator of Digital Archeology, an exhibit that charts pivotal moments in web design over the last twenty years. I was initially confused by this sentiment – what would the Internet be without web pages? But in studying the contents of Digital Archeology, Boulton’s meaning became clear. A notable shift takes place in the early-2000s: the Internet mutates from a series of web pages that appear uniform to anyone looking at them into an interactive, mutable experience to be controlled and manipulated by the user viewing it.
