unmediated

The capabilities and limits of newsfeeds as news sources « John Bracken

RSS and blgging were both declared dead yesterday. Paul Boutin is only the latest in a long line to toss dirt on blogging’s coffin in Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004; but the case of blogging as an old medium more suited for long-form journalism seems to be gaining currency:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel says RSS, too, is , losing currency to the network and the newsfeed:

RSS has peaked….I believe that social network newsfeeds will become more a more prominent delivery channel over time. 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.

Of course, Rubel’s example of a news story he learned about through FriendFeed, “a campus shooting [that] has unfolded at Western Kentucky University,” (Rubel called “it a great example of where this is going”) may not have actually happened, it turns out. Note the more than a dozen comments bemoaning the “shooting,” appended by one note that “it’s unclear whether there was a gunman or not. It may have just been a fight.” Rubel has yet to correct his post.

[For a related post, see Blogs can be slow and wrong: Memeorandum and Ben Smith.]