I read this post about the “Blogs are dead (we’ll not really/but they are)” thing…

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

It is curious, because I’ve never used blogs (or RSS, for what matters) as a way of “reading the news“. I think all the alternative ways of communication (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc) are very good for talking about the now.

Twitter is great, but a timeline is really focused in what’s going on today. That’s great, but I can easily miss articles, because, for any low number of people you follow, you simply need a lot of time to be “updated”. And is hugely biased over people tweeting a lot. Again, is a great tool. It’s fast and it’s great for provoking conversation. And incredibly funny. I use it everyday, but it is not a good tool for deep thoughts, or for learning.

Facebook? It’s oriented to friends and family. It’s great to keep in touch, to share photos, but it is oriented on the personal side.

Reddit or Hacker News? Great curating content and discovery, but I lack control over what is displayed there. I can’t follow someone that I (not a community) find interesting.

Those are all great tools for discovering. For sharing content. But I still value a lot my personal RSS selection, when I have been selecting channels for years. I think is (so far) the best way of following articles that aspire to talk about something more permanent than this week sensation. I have an automatic reading list of “things I don’t want to miss“.

It is probably true that blogs (and RSS syndication) are not “hot” and that now teens start using other tools, and public spotlight is in other technologies. I’m fine with that, I understand that the rest of the tools are fantastic and fill different needs. But I still think that blogs are the best posible tool at the moment for the kind of deep exposition of ideas that I still like, including the strongly personalised selection of my sources. 

I’ve also argued that they are good for creating a community of readers and the comments on blogs typically add value to the original article. I know that I am on a minority here, but I think that the comments on blogs belong with the article, not on a external service.

I guess that I think that just because something is not “the next hot thing in tech”, we shouldn’t be treat it like it is dead.