Month: October 2008

Is blogging (like Britney) past its prime?

Two posts about the state of blogging caught my eye earlier this week, and made me stop and think about the future of blogging.

  1. This essay in Wired — Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 — lamenting the state of blogging today. “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.” (Hat tip to Ron Bronson for the find.)
  2. This announcement that Britney Spears has started a blog.

Coincidence?

Twitter breaks the news of Western Kentucky shooting

Update, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008: Apparently no shots were fired in Wednesday’s incident at Western Kentucky University. WKU defends erroneous reports about shooting.

I first heard about today’s shooting at Western Kentucky University via Twitter. Here’s how the story unfolded for me a few hours ago:

Scanning my Twitter feed, I noticed this post from @steverubel (of Micro Persuasion fame):

//friendfeed.com/breakingnewson'
@steverubel: 'Friendfeed erupts with comments around the university shooting http://friendfeed.com/breakingnewson'

I clicked the friendfeed link in hopes of learning more details about the shooting (such as what college, how many hurt, etc.). But there wasn’t much available yet, only:

“REPORTS: MULTIPLE GUNMEN ON WESTERN KENTUCKY CAMPUS; STUDENTS IN “IMMEDIATE DANGER”; URGED TO TAKE SHELTER. DETAILS SOON.” (link)

This is the third or fourth time I’ve gotten breaking news from my Twitter stream. I see this as a growing trend.

So does Rubel. In a blog post today, he writes that the newsfeed is the future of news.

Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.

“The newsfeed metaphor,” writes Rubel, “synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timeliness and that’s why it’s the beginning of a new era in news.”

Among the 400-plus tweeters I keep an eye on, there are a handful of news organizations. Not one of them fed me the information about this shooting as quickly as Rubel did with his link to BreakingNewsOn’s friendfeed site. BreakingNewsOn, billed as “the breaking news wire,” also has a Twitter account that I am now following.

BreakingNewsOn also is based in the Netherlands, and it broke the news about an event that happened in Kentucky. Only on the Internet.