Blogs and Wikis will be dead by 2012
TweetMike Harrison of Kineo has made a provocative prediction that by 2012 Wikis and Blogs will be dead. [Click on the Breeze presentation for more details on his vision]. He has also included SMS in the extinction list. Nick, you have company, I guess. Here is an interesting rebuttal from Demin Barlas published by Destination KM:
Blogs will survive for the same reason civil rights will survive — people who have won important freedoms do not easily give those freedoms back. The blogosphere is freedom: freedom to read the entire spectrum of human reaction and commentary, not just the handful of views pimped by the mainstream press; freedom to create one’s own responses to the world right from the computer; freedom to be part of an alternative audience; freedom to cultivate an alternative audience (most of us, alas, don’t have TV shows, newspaper columns, and big reading publics of our own, but does that mean we should say nothing?); and freedom to form our own relationships with information.
Couldn’t agree more. <Via Madan Menon>
it is interesting to note that doomsdayers and soothesayers invariably try and predict the fall of a particular service, or phenomenon. They would have recieved a much needed moral boost with them predicting the dot com bust.
I guess the bust was a case of economics and chaos, and that when the two come together, they are like oil and water. You cannot hope to implement a “business plan” on a system that is built from chaos, unless in the chaotic system, there is a form of semblance to sanity. Amazon.com a surviver, but why? because they streamlined the web within the portal. all links were inside the portal to various other parts, selling, cross selling and upselling. However, any other portal needed 1. information from somwhere else, 2.revenues from somewhere else, and 3. found it difficult to keep people on the site because links were leading to : somewhere else.
Wiki’s and blogs however are a system that require no investment, no advertising, and there is no “economic” model based on this.I would relate this to iPods’ disruptive innovation.
More importantly, wiki’s and blogs do not try and tame chaos, they are chaos as well. a butterfly flapping its wing sets off a ripple effect. bloggers start writing, and posting. millions of posts in all directions.
It cannot die.
Unless we have several unfortunate twists including a law against net neutrality, its difficult to see why blogs and wikis will disappear as long as they are not replaced by better forms of free expression.
Thanks for the comments Madan and Kesava. Kesava, i liked your idea of looking at it with an open mind – maybe there will be newer better communication mediums that will replace blogs and wikis! time will tell.