Blogging is a somewhat dead medium. It used to be the most popular form of expression on the internet – today, YouTube has pretty much supplanted it, and the “vlog” (video-log) format has supplanted what information blogs once provided. Sure, a video can be more enjoyable than text, in some cases, but there is a tradeoff – not withstanding how generally poor I feel YouTube is an outlet for putting out more personal or unique content, there are some issues with how the internet on a whole handles the information in the video – it really can’t.
In a blog article, if I, for example, write an article about the Commodore 128 computer, every single word in the article will be indexed by search engines, meaning if I make a point about something random in the middle of the article, then a google search for that will probably show the article as a hit for that content. Compare this to a YouTube video that can’t really be indexed in such a way – The best the search engines can do is go based on video titles and tags, so unless the videos are just perfectly tagged, or focus on one specific thing, you may never find the video that talks about exactly what you want.
Let’s not get started on, for a longer video, finding information quickly – you pretty much have to watch the whole video, while a blog article can be more quickly read or skimmed over at the very least, and information found quite quickly.
I honestly feel there will come a time soon when the traditional blog makes a return – hell, we may already be in it and just not realize it yet. Who knows. I certainly hope so – I for one would enjoy a return to a slightly more laid back internet, stemming away from current social media and going back to the more traditional self-run site of some kind. At least, it’s something to hope for.
This article is inspired by, and based somewhat upon, a video by YouTube user and Typewriter enthusiast Joe Van Cleave entitled “The Power Of Blogging” where he discusses the benefits of a blog article compared to other forms of expression online.
Enjoy.