Tyler Tech: Long live blogs

A while back, editor in chief Rachel Fauber claimed in her “From the Editor’s Desk” that “we are witnessing the death of blogs.”

She said that personal blogs, crappy blogs and Twitter were saturating the market and shortening attention spans.

Nobody, she thinks, will ever again read something more than 140 characters.

Nobody wants to bother with stupid HTML and all those darned words.

Shenanigans, I say.

I may be old fashioned – for fun, ask me what I think about the newspaper business – but blogs aren’t going anywhere.

Trying to say they are is laughable.

If blogs were dying, Blogger and WordPress would not be on Alexa’s list of the top 20 most-visited Web sites.

Blogger is actually above Twitter, believe it or not.

If blogs were dying, Barack Obama wouldn’t be calling on Politico at press conferences.

The Towerlight wouldn’t have a section highlighting our in-house bloggers.

The niche nature of a lot of blogs out there makes their success hard to judge from the outside, I believe.

One of her points was that the marketplace had become cluttered.

There is a difference between xXxHOTGURLxXx and The Huffington Post. Some high schooler’s LiveJournal where he talks about how his iPhone gives him social validation is not Gizmodo.

Chris Crocker is not Perez Hilton (thankfully, as this world can barely handle one of those.)

My point is that there are bad bloggers just as there are bad writers, bad television networks and bad newspapers.

Everybody and their neighbor has a Wordpress or a Blogspot or a (shudder) LiveJournal, sure, but that doesn’t mean anybody reads them all.

People find bad blogs and don’t read them, so people end up talking to thin air, and that’s their problem.

I don’t consider that market saturation, because the high schooler’s LiveJournal isn’t in your face.

You crack open Google Reader and pull what you want. No more, no less.

If anything, some blogs saturate their own market with a river of posts so that after a few days away from Google Reader, I’m swamped and I just either blow through the past few days of entries, or just hit “Mark All As Read” to get it over with.

Rachel’s primary argument, however, is that attention spans are getting shorter.

If people’s attention spans are getting shorter, then by 2020, somebody will invent a site called Gruntr, where people communicate what they’re doing by grunting loudly at their computer.

It’ll be the only thing the people of 2020 will have time for. But it will be fully Web 4.0 (or whatever the buzzword shall be).

You can make friends, grunt at people you like and even post live videos of you grunting.

If you want to embed media, you’ll have to throw a dinosaur bone at your monitor or – for you mobile Grunters – throw your device against a wall.

Then when society inevitably tires of the time and energy it takes to release a single Grunt, some brilliant entrepreneur will introduce Blinkr, where you have to convey a single message in 140 blinks or less.

Should I trademark these names?

But according to our fearless leader, by this point, 99 percent of my readers have tuned out of this column by midway through the first paragraph, long before I gave you all my incredible ideas.

It’s a shame, really.

So I’d just like to take the opportunity to say what really grinds my gears: stale Glen pizza, bureaucracy, sports fans and you, America!

F*** you!

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