There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter and blogs about Paul Boutin’s Wired article Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 over the last day or so, but I was most interested in Rory Cellan-Jones’ response Is blogging dead? on the BBC website.
Rory clearly believes that blogging is not yet dead and cites the success of Robert Peston’s blog:
If I were asked to name the single most influential journalistic product of the moment – in the UK at least – it would be a blog written by a BBC colleague. Robert Peston’s Peston’s Picks has been the essential guide to the current financial crisis, and is read avidly in the City and at Westminster. It gets an audience of more than 650,000 on some days, and hundreds of comments from readers.
I find this slightly ironic as I’m not sure I see Rory and Robert’s articles as true blogs. Yes they are articles published that readers can comment on and be part of the conversation, but they appear within the BBC news website as commentary. Rory goes on to say:
But the very success of the professional bloggers may be draining traffic – and attention – away from the amateurs of the “real” blogosphere. Does that matter? Well it certainly makes it harder for fresh new voices to be heard – can you name a blogger who’s burst onto the scene in the last year?
It’s a tricky one. Rory and Robert aren’t professional bloggers as such but perhaps occupy a middle ground between the struggling amateur <ahem> and the professional uber-blogs such as Engadget.