If There Weren't Such A Thing As Blogging, We'd All Be Frustrated Bloggers..

Image by roland via Flickr

The term arms race, in its original usage, describes a competition between two or more parties for real or apparent military supremacy. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapons, greater armies, or superior military technology in a technological escalation. Nowadays the term is commonly used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors.

The blogosphere lately has resembled an arms race, it's apparantly clear that being dismissive of technology and platforms that have been the foundation for many years has become a popular trend. The push towards real-time has changed the map considerably, Louis Gray asks "What Is This Real-Time Thing, And Where Is It Going?" What's certain is that the shift towards real-time is reverberating through the industry, change has come to the blogosphere!

He questions whether many of the names we consider household names today may be gone, replaced with others. Other sources claim that blogging is dead, RSS is on borrowed time and this week the announcement from JS-KIT of the "death of comments". Lets introduce some perspective, basically then we're removing all forms of reviews, opinion, debate and discussion? Anything perceived as a non value added service will become irrelevant and ignored in favour of real-time, on demand and easily consumed content.

"If there weren't such a thing as football, we'd all be frustrated footballers." ~ Mick Lyons

I'm not prepared to contribute to the blogging arbitrary, I feel that blogging provides a platform for expressing views on a subject. For when I have more to say than 140 characters and when sharing a picture just isn't enough. RSS may not meet expectations but it's manageable, admittedly the amount of feeds I subscribe to can be overwhelming at times but I wouldn't be subscribed if I wasn't interested in the content.

Forms of communication are evolving but to declare the "death of comments" seems a statement to provoke a reaction and the opportunity to introduce Echo. It's true that comments are fragmented, that social networking channels have become the destination and the aim is to bring that back to the blog which is the original source.

Comments are not dead. Encouraging a real community on your site to have real conversations has always been important. It’s still important today and is only becoming increasingly more relevant. It’s very true that people have choices on where to react to a topic; they can tweet about it, discuss it on Reddit, or share it on FriendFeed. Conversations are happening outside of sites and it’s important to bring that value back to the source content. ~ Daniel Ha (Disqus)

As reactions evolve and blogging continues to be reincarnated in the same form, I'm intrigued about the future of the blogosphere and whether we're truly on the verge of reinventing the wheel?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media Comments by Disqus: Public Release Today! (mashable.com)
  
• Twitter Sign In Comes to Disqus: Try It Now on Mashable! (mashable.com)
• Gathering The Pulse Of Your Blog Around The Internet With Disqus (jeffisageek.net)
• Who Is Your Audience And Are Audiences Different? (regulargeek.com)
• Viva La Blogger or Lifestreaming and All His Friends (joedawsons.com)