Dead Media Beat: WIRED blogs
*Well, here I am in the guts of a completely new and rather alien blog authoring system.
*Meanwhile, over in BoingBoing Gadgets, Wired bloggers and their Wired print colleagues are really airing the laundry.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/05/18/welcome-wired-we-cal.html
*Fascinating stuff, especially considering that most of it is WIRED people mourning opportunities lost to their corporate overlords, and doing so in the pages of BoingBoing, which was, in earlier days, an absolute chicken-feed scratch-it-up-out-of-nowhere fanzine blog. Welcome 2009.
Study of the discussion over there should make it clear to interested parties just how frail blogs are as a medium. The blog looks solid and glossy on the screen, and behind the screen it’s chickenwire and bamboo splints.
Blogs make real-estate speculation look rock solid. Not to mention their inherent linkrot, which turns surfblogs into incoherent Alzheimer’s mush as soon as your back is turned.
This blog was the first, pioneer WIRED blog, yet it get no mention in that discussion. Why? Mostly because BEYOND THE BEYOND was never any trouble to WIRED, so nobody ever had any hurt feelings about it.
Also because BEYOND THE BEYOND is a living media fossil. It’s a print-author-turned-cybercelebrity surfblog. People don’t do that much these days. It wouldn’t seem unusual
I was asked to do a blog for WIRED because I was doing a column for paper WIRED. What the hey, in for a lamb in for a sheep, right? Then WIRED stopped all its columns — (okay by me, it’s not like they were tenured professorships) — but nobody ever asked me to shut the blog off. It just… oozed right along.
In the meantime, teams of motivated professionals were out there in newer, better-calculated WIRED blogs, sweating, bleeding and envying one another’s beer fridges at the office. I wished them well, but about all I did for their cause was crosslink to them because they were fun to read. I was never working ten percent that hard. In fact, I barely consider this working.
My salary’s not a problem: I never had one. At least, never for *blogging.* I blogged to spread attention about some stuff, to let my relatives know I was alive in various strange countries, and because blogging gets me junkets. Junkets have become the live-music-performance for the hollowed-out journalism business model. I do lots of ‘em.
*So, I was the primeval WIRED blog, and to look at the discussion-link up there, the dynamics clearly suggest that I could pretty easily be the last WIRED blog.
Not that I’m judgmental about the relative values of these offerings; or their inherent appeal to a highly destabilized modern public. It’s more a statement of bio-physics, like noting that a trilobite eats less than a horse.
Except for one dire little issue: migration. Blog platforms themselves are inherently unstable. Which is bad. Did you notice during the last month, that I could not post any graphics? There was no budget to fix a minor kink like that. It would have made every sort of sense to simply shrug and say, “Well — software issues!” And then pull the plug. So long, sandcastle. Plenty of fresh sand-grains over in Twitter.
I’ve got four thousand Twitter followers now. I dunno why, but a lot of people who used to blog now simply tweet. It’s faster, it’s quicker, it’s platform-agnostic, there’s no RSS and no overhead. It’s free. No hosting costs.
And Twitter is so unstable that it’s like a Fail Whale with occasional functionality attached. Plus it has never made a dime.
So we dodged a bullet just now. A migration bullet
This blog might also perish from its sheer obscurity. BEYOND used to be boldly linked to all the other WIRED beat-blogs in one chromed united front. That practice was quietly, and properly, abandoned because, well, it looks silly. There’s whole teams of pros in there busting ass to break major stories about hackers, science and the military, and then over yonder there’s some guy visiting Belgrade while whimsically musing about Bollywood movies? What the heck gives with that? Comments turned off, haphazard scrapbooky design, freaky typography with (((triple parentheses,))) old school ASCII usenet habits like *asterisks* for italics?
It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because it’s a historical accident. It’s luck, like me being the cover boy on the very first issue of WIRED. Somebody had to do it. For all their charisma and star quality, Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe were not gonna put *themselves* on their cover.
Media history, as you may have gathered, kills the strong and swift as well as the meek and slow. Sometimes more so. Put a famine across the land — and boy do we ever have a media famine right now — and both print and online media can look like the Burgess Shale.
But, well, I do have a shiny new sandcastle — for the moment.
Doors and windows all in the wrong places, looks like it’s got some air-conditioning that I don’t really need, and there’s a strange ozone smell in the basement. Stuff I’m posting is vanishing into unique URLs that aren’t linked to the site, the graphics and video upload still both look dodgy, I can’t crosspost from FlickR, etc etc. Bear with me.
We’re back in business.
