The blog with the Google tattoo

Dearly beloved we are gathered here today....

The blog is dead..it's official - Blogging is  so 2004.


"Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge." Wired 2008

"One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right." Copyblogger 2007

The blog is dead and has been for sometime now - as a marketing tool it has been overtaken by the social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and the punky attitude of the early days has been replaced by corporate blogging.

"So there are plenty of reasons to be depressed about the blogosphere. It hasn't quite lived up to its early promise of a place where new voices would be heard, where reasoned argument would take place - a kind of Athenian ideal of democracy. Like just about everything else that has emerged from the web in the last couple of decades it's messy, chaotic and imperfect. But then, so is democracy - and nobody has come up with anything better than that either. " THE VIRTUAL REVOLUTION

In a sense I think I agree that the blog is dead, at least the form that blogs took in their original incarnation, but like everything the blog has developed over the years and now comes in many shapes and sizes - I'm never really thought of the Tainted Archive as a blog, not really. I mean it is a blog - it must be since it's hosted by blogger but I've always looked at it as a magazine...a blogozine if you like. To me it is the natural progression to the fanzines we used to buy.

And whilst some of The Archive's content may be genuine shit and of interest to only a select few, I am proud of much of the Archive's content - I've tended to come at it from a different angle to traditional blogs - I couldn't give a toss about generating revenue from the Archive, I really couldn't. Of course I use it to market my own books but if you look at it as a whole it is a very small percentage of the blog's swollen archives that push my own books. I update several times a day and since the Archive went live in 2008,  the number of days when I haven't posted anything can be counted on one hand.

"I blog more than some tweeting twats twitter" Gary Dobbs/Jack Martin

And yet the news media still claim the blog is dead -Organisations and individuals are having to find new ways to get their message heard, and are turning to services such as Twitter and Facebook in their droves. That's all very well but f**k Twitter - we still need to write whole sentences otherwise one day our messages will be trimmed down to mere bytes. And besides I've not really got a message to get across - and it is a fact that the great majority of tweets link to a blog post.

I maintain the Archive because I enjoy it and, in some small way, I suppose it is an addiction...but a very benign addiction. And besides where else but a blog would you find an article like this illustrated by a cat wearing a watermelon? Now surely that makes it special!!!

So I don't care if the blog is dead - in fact I'll dance on its grave.