I’m going to tell you something that us “experts” don’t want you to know. Ready?
Blogging is dead.
Wha? Blogging is dead? Didn’t you just write a book on creating your own blog? Yeah I did, but let’s get this straight—blogging is writing and a blog is just a website that makes it really easy to do that. When I took on writing the book that would become Create Your Own Blog, I have to admit I was a little reluctant at first. Not because I didn’t think I could do it (I wasn’t smart enough to be worried about that), but because I think getting stuck on the idea of blogs and blogging as what changed things in the last five years sells us all short.
Here’s what made blogs great:
- We wrote like we meant it
- We linked to lots of other people and sources
- We commented
- We read what each other wrote
- We used tools (aka blog engines) that made all of this easily.
And none of that has changed since then. I think we’ve only gotten better at it, in fact. The fact of the matter is that little of what we’ve been doing needs to be tied to a word.
Humans like to define things. People wanted to find a ways to differentiate what became to be called “blogging” from the myriad (plethora?) of websites that cropped up like mushrooms between 1995 and the early 2000s. That was fine. Then when “blogging” took off, a blog took on some kind of mystical quality that if you had one all your marketing problems would be over. With a blog, anything was possible. Yeah well like a young lady I know once said:
“Come on, don’t you know a blog is just a website…”
And that is 100% true. What people forget is that when more and more people started to use blogging tools something more interesting was happening. Suddenly writing something and putting it onto a website didn’t require much more than knowing how to use HotMail. Suddenly you could write as much as you wanted, post, and then people freakin read the stuff. Yeah we read a lot of stuff back then. RSS readers were essential to the digerati, so we read a lot.
Then we left comments.
Then we wrote our own posts and linked to other posts.
This is how blogging seemed to have superpowers. This is how a single post could start a tempest in a tea cup or bring down a presidential candidate. We could write and distribute information as fast as we could type (and some of us type really freakin’ fast).
Today smart companies use blog engines to power their “regular” websites because they figured out that a WordPress-powered website was easier to update and maintain than one made up of lots of individual pages. Is that a blog or just smart publishing?
Don’t worry if people and pundits tell you that blogging is dead.
Don’t worry if people think you’re yesterday’s news launching your new WordPress blog/site.
Don’t worry because the word “blogging” might have lost its allure, because “writing and sharing good stuff” never does.
Just start.
Just write.
Just create “an interactive, dynamic, database-drive website where publishing is really easy.”
Yeah, just blog.
