Why Blogs Still Matter
With the success of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not unusual for some to wonder if there’s any need to have your own blog or website when it comes to personal networking. Isn’t it easy enough to have a profile on the leading social networks, and interact on those?
Last week, however, saw an example of why, sometimes, it’s good to have a space that is all yours. As rumors swirled, and doubt has crept in about the future of the social bookmarking site, Delicious, I was once again reminded that you can’t control what you don’t control.
Obviously, I’m a big fan of delicious, and have used it to augment features of this site as well as an educational site I’ve developed on our firm’s intranet. On the other hand, I now find myself somewhat at the whim of Yahoo! in terms of what the future will hold for Delicious. I’ve been testing out replacing some of the features using Diigo instead of Delicious, so I would still be able to have things like linkrolls, and maybe even weekly wrap-up link posts on the blog, if worse comes to worse and Delicious does wind up on the Web 2.0 scrap heap. That still leave me then at the mercy of Diigo being succesful and staying in business.
On the other hand, no matter what happens with social bookmarking sites, this blog remains. It’s mine. I pay for the domain, I pay for the hosting. I control every aspect of what is on this page. I can’t say that about my Tweetstream, or my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Sure, I feed this blog to those sites, as a courtesy to folks who want to interact with me there instead of coming to the blog, but no matter what those sites do in the future, (service disruptions, poor policies that drive users away, horrible commercialization, etc.), the blog remains.
No matter what future social network we all decide to jump on, the blog remains.
My writing isn’t subject to the vagaries of Web 2.0, or 3.0 tools. My writing will continue right here, where’s it’s always been. I may just be grabbing the RSS feed in different places, but the blog remains. Are you willing to bet your entire online presence that anything else will remain in the same way?
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