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Tony Byrne

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In Defense of Blogging

27-Oct-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Building Business Case

Recent months have seen -- perhaps inevitably -- something of a backlash against blogging. Earlier this week, Wired told you to "pull the plug" on your blog. Others have even speculated that the economic downturn will reduce gratuitous blogging.

One argument is as old as the first blog post: that you should stop blogging and get a real life. Balance in life can certainly become more elusive in a networked world, but surely you can blog and still find time to go hiking with your family.

The newer and headier case against blogging argues that you should follow a sexier alternative -- micro-blogging -- via Twitter, or Facebook status messages, or various other similar services.

Micro-blogging is more spontaneous, the argument goes, and its length limits keep you more disciplined. So you should put your energy there. Besides, Twittersphere remains much less commercialized than the public blogosphere.

I don't subscribe to this argument. Twitter and Facebook give you the opportunity to push trivia, personal status updates, brief opinions, and ephemera -- all in a venue more suitable for those types of information. We've certainly enjoyed some good internal debates on the internal CMS Watch micro-blog service.

But what if you want to seriously develop an idea rather than share what your pet cat just did or pass along a single hyperlink? This requires a narrative. What if you want your argument to be searchable? To grow over time? Edward Tufte went overboard in his criticism of PowerPoint bullets, but surely his collateral defense of the narrative argument form merits renewed attention today.

In any case, it's surely ironic that -- after people feared that blogging would "dumb-down" the Web (see here or here) -- now we hear that blogging has become too rich an environment.

This may speak more to narcissism than substance. People tend to micro-blog about themselves (my Facebook status box, like yours, defaults to a leading "Tony is..."). Whereas the best public blogs are about issues and topics in the wider world. If your blog constitutes a personal diary about your life, then sure, switch to Twitter. Just remember that Twitter et. al. are also getting found by corporations, and you'll see as much drivel through those channels as any other.

If you are trying to discuss something bigger than yourself, don't give up on blogging so quickly. In fact, I think blogging in the business context has more relevance than ever, in a world where customers want to be able to understand and connect with the firms they patronize. People complain about marketing shill-blogs, and I hate those blogs, too. But yours doesn't have to work that way.

And remember, you have choices among blogging tools; if you want to read our assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, check out our Enterprise Social Software Report.