Steve Rubel announced yesterday that he has set aside blogging in favor of lifestreaming. Steve has been blogging at the very popular Micropersuasion for years, since 2004 if memory serves me correctly.
He's a veteran in this space whose influence has literally helped shape it. He is also someone tasked with the responsibility of looking down the path to determine what's next. In one of his last posts at Micropersuasion, he said this...
"My job at Edelman is to remain at the cutting edge and to advise major marketers on what's next. This means I must experiment and evolve or I will die."
Evolve or Die
"Evolve or die" must be the mantra for many of we "veterans." I'm talking about people like Toby Bloomberg, Denise Wakeman, Yvonne DiVita, Debbie Weil and others who, like me, have been doing this a long time, but who, if we don't watch out will get ourselves pigeon-holed in the past and outpaced by younger, more nimble personas who don't carry the baggage of years gone by.
Maybe I'm wrong, but blogging has been around long enough that there is an "old school" mentality. I think I'm a victim of it. Hardly a day passes when I don't look back to 2005 and think of it as the "good old days" of business blogging.
Truth be told, Steve's jumping ship on blogging, which he says "feels old," has shaken me about as much as the news of Michael Jackson's death. That may sound silly to you, but I've invested my life in this enterprise for the past five years, so this is a big deal. One of business blogging's icons is leaving blogging behind in favor of something new, lifestreaming.
(When I refer to Steve as an iconic figure, that's not hyperbole. You recall the cover story from BusinessWeek magazine in May 2005? It featured Steve.)
The Old is New Again
Back in the day, before social networks like Facebook and MySpace were popular and long before Twitter was on all but the most avant-garde's horizon, we "lifestreamed" on our blogs. Everything went there because that was about the only place content could go! Robert Scoble is a perfect example. He'd post mulitple times a day about all sorts of things. If you wanted to know what was going on with Scoble, you read his blog.
While he still maintains his blog, now there's Building43, a new project he's doing in concert with Rackspace, his new employer. It's supposed to be a mashup of video, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. (explanation here)
The more I think about it, I wonder if tools like Posterous and Tumblr aren't the "new" blog platforms, just better suited for today's bent toward incrementality. Could it be that the old is new again? Perhaps so, and Steve figured that out more quickly than the rest of us.
What Happens to Long Form Blogging?
More than once I've referred to Brian Clark's statement about value blogging. Essentially, blogging has morphed from being the "shoot from the hip, speak from the heart," extemporaneous form of expression to something more well-researched, full length and almost article-like. Even Scoble refered to his blog as long-form.
I still think there's a place for that. It's not going away anytime soon. Even as long as blogging has been around (more than a decade), it's still catching on. A friend of mine is even writing a "blogging 101" book. Can you believe it? A basic, how-to blog book in 2009?! Incredible as that may seem, I'd venture to guess thousands of copies will be sold. (At least my friend hopes so.)
What Does the Future Hold for Business Blogging?
In 2004, I asked the question on my blog, what's the future of blogging? A number of notable people chimed in to respond. One of those was Steve. Unfortunately, that particular blog has long since gone the way of the albatross and the content from that series is lost (something I chagrin to this day).
I wonder, though, if it's not time to ask that question again. What do you think? What does the future hold for blogging, particularly business blogs? Does Steve's move away from blogging signal a shift? Or, is there room for both lifestreaming and long-form blogging? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
PS: Micropersuasion is a treasure. Truly, it's a chronicle of the evolution of the Internet, the social Web and of blogging itself. I'm grateful he's leaving it live for archival purposes.
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